How can I increase battery life in Ubuntu?

Question

I really like Ubuntu, and I want to work with it always instead of windows. But the problem I find is that the battery runs out very fast (< 2 hours) when I use Ubuntu. It would have been great if I could get like 3 - 4 hours of battery life.

My windows provides me 4.5 - 5 hours. Is there any way to increase battery backup?

I have tried to disable my AMD Radeon graphics by adding radeon to blacklist. But still there is a lot of heating.

My laptop is a Compaq Presario CQ43. And I'm running Ubuntu Studio 12.04.

Answer 1

Make sure you have updated drivers for your hardware. Generally the brightness of the laptop consumes the battery more. In Ubuntu if the brightness is not increased or decreased you can refer here . Moreover try updatating the kernel.

Answer 2

you can use TLP: is an advanced power management command line tool for Linux that tries to apply these settings / tweaks for you automatically, depending on your Linux distribution and hardware

http://www.webupd8.org/2013/04/improve-power-usage-battery-life-in.html

Answer 3

I recommend trying laptop-mode-tools. It can be installed from the repo with:

sudo apt-get install laptop-mode-tools

If you have installed tlp already uninstall it again. It conflicts with laptop-mode-tools. After installation type

lmt-config-gui 

in a terminal and uncheck usb-autosuspend. This will stop the deactivation of your unused usb-devices.

Another great tool is powertop. It gives you detailed information about the energy consumption of your laptop and offers some power tweaks. It can be installed with

sudo apt-get install powertop

To make its tweaks permanent follow the instruction from this answer: https://askubuntu.com/a/172243/222723

Depending on your hardware this side could be useful too for you:https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/PowerManagement/PowerSavingTweaks