I used to have a dual boot of win7 and ubuntu, but Ubuntu just ate up battery life really quickly and it was just useless. I decided to switch to gnome openSUSE 12.1 in hopes of having better battery life. From what I see, its exactly the same in terms of battery consumption. I’ve tried a few things to help the situation. I installed laptop-mode tools and I also installed powertop but I none of these seem to do anything. My laptop overheats very quickly in opensuse and the battery dies fairly fast. What are some ways I can reduce the power consumption? I’m googled around but there are a lot of changes that people have made to their kernel environment that seemed to have helped from what I understand. I’m a little bit of a noob when it comes to these things…
When I was seeing the powertop statistics, I was noticing that my cpu frequency is running at the max most of the time. I’m guessing that the extra temperature is what makes my fan speed increase as well. But in general, the laptop is very hot. I experience none of these problems on win7 unless I’m playing a video game or something. I didn’t install my switchable graphics driver or anything, I just want it to run on intel graphics (which I think it’s doing but I’m not sure).
I get around 4.5 hours on windows 7, and maybe 2 hours max on opensuse. I’m also sure that the extra heat isn’t helping the battery life either.
Can someone help me to reduce all of these issues? I need a linux environment because I’m learning to be a software developer and I’m the most comfortable on linux. I really don’t want to have to buy an expensive mac or something…
Thank you.
My laptop specs:
Lenovo U460
NVIDIA 305m/Intel HD switchable graphics
Intel Core i5 2.54 ghz
500gb 5400rpm hd.
How would I know if nvidia is running at all? I don’t want the nvidia card to be eating away all the power so I want to make sure that I’m only using integrated graphics. I don’t want to use the nvidia card at all. The bumblebee guide seems to show how to turn on the nvidia card…
I also tried installing CFU and it didn’t really seem to help. Also, I have no idea how to make changes to the kernel in such a way that it can reduce power consumption. A little help?
The bumblebee guide seems to show how to turn on the nvidia card…
No, bumblebee is meant to give you control over the Nvidia card. Have you looked into your BIOS setup, it might be possible to disable it there? That would be the easiest solution, but isn’t possible on all systems. To see which graphics chips currently running run this command: