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I have my laptop ( Dell Inspiron 14R) on dual boot with Ubuntu 12.04 and Windows 7. While using Windows 7, I used to get about 2.5-3 hours on battery fully charged (with my cellphone connected for 3g Internet). The battery is almost 2 years old. But in Ubuntu 12.04, I'm getting only about 1-1.5 hrs on battery.

I tried installing jupiter, also tried some tweaks that were mentioned in the forums, like editing the grub file. But nothing seems to work. I am not sure if any app is draining the battery. The one application that I use always is firefox. It's always open.

Is there any way I could get at least 2.5 hrs of battery time?

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    Not much you can do I'm afraid. Have a look at this question: askubuntu.com/q/151884/55576
    – leousa
    Jul 13, 2012 at 16:47
  • There are steps you can take to improve battery life. Several solutions are outlined here and here.
    – Jarmo
    Jul 13, 2012 at 16:51
  • well if you follow the links in the thread that I provided they will lead you to the same solutions...now, that is not gonna change drastically your battery time...if he has firefox open I assume he needs wifi or ethernet card on....just one example. Although people are working hard to fix this, the linux community lags behind Mac or Win in terms of battery life for several reasons that are outlined in that thread...tweaking config files, number of write cycles to HD or switching off hardware components will get it slightly better yes...but it is a non-optimum solution.
    – leousa
    Jul 13, 2012 at 16:56
  • thanks for the replies guys. I noticed that I have about 500-900 wake ups per second. Is this unusual? Is there a method to reduce this?
    – Rahul
    Jul 13, 2012 at 17:54

4 Answers 4

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I had the same problem! Installing Bumblebee really worked for me!

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia linux-headers-generic

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As the comments suggest, this is most likely related to the kernel bug, which drains laptop batteries quite fast due to an inefficiencies and too many wakeups and I/O errors.

All you can do at this stage is wait, or contribute to the kernel.

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try to setup the laptop tools :

sudo apt-get install laptop-mode-tools

powertop went from a discharge of +/- 42W to an average 30W.

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Try this:

For installing:

sudo apt-get install pm-utils

For activating:

sudo pm-powersave true

For deactiviting:

sudo pm-powersave false

Worked for me.

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