Laptop minimal power consumption tweaks [duplicate]

Solution 1:

Besides Powertop (available from Software Center), and turning all options to GOOD when on battery, you need to set several kernel parameters:

i915.i915_enable_rc6=1
i915.i915_enable_fbc=1
i915.lvds_downclock=1
pcie_aspm=force

Add to /etc/default/grub, Line starting with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash pcie_aspm i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 i915.lvds_downclock=1"

call sudo update-grub after editing...

This boosted my battery life from 4 hours to over 10 hours (without networking)

Check out this post http://www.williambrownstreet.net/blog/?p=387

Solution 2:

The kernel team also has a Power Management tweaks page:

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/PowerManagement/PowerSavingTweaks

Solution 3:

Here are things that I've tried that seem to work:

• Run PowerTop. For me, that revealed some stray gtk-gnash processes that didn't disappear even after I quit Firefox. So I did ps aux | grep "gnash" and killed those processes manually.

• Stop DesktopCouch, per Stop and start desktop couch with "service"?

• Stop UbuntOne Sync, via How can I stop ubuntuone-syncd?

I may also set up a "battery" compiz profile that has no bells and whistles and switch to that when I want to minimize compiz's power use.

Solution 4:

I have found that logging into Unity 2d instead of 3d helps tremendously:

• How do I install and switch to the Unity 2D desktop?

Also from my personal experience, if you use Chrome/Chromium it consumes a bunch of power when compared to Firefox, so when I am in a battery situation I switch to Firefox. Also if you can get away with it, turning off Javascript in Firefox will also dramatically cut its power usage, though it's difficult to use most modern websites without Javascript.