Laptop Battery Draining Too Fast. Laptop is too hot

Question

I have HP ProBook 4540s with CPU Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-3110M and GPU AMD Radeon HD 7650M and Intel(R) HD Graphics 4000. (Intel® Ivybridge Mobile also.)

OK, the problem is that the laptop is getting very hot when using Ubuntu compared to when using Windows. Also, the battery drains faster compared to Windows.

So, how do I get rid of this problem?

BTW: Recently I managed to fix the brightness control problem on this laptop, but turning down the brightness of the screen doesn't help much. I used the method involving:

sudo gedit /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf

(It took me months to find this method.)

Running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS x64.

My Windows is Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 x64, working fine.

Also, a while back I had Windows 8.1 Enterprise x64 installed there also. It had same problem with overheating, and low battery life. (Maybe a Driver Problem???)

Answer 1

Jupiter developement was stoped since 2012 !

Now use TLD

Answer 2

You may be having the same problem as this, in which case power manager will not help. I will just copy answer here:

Most likely the source of heat is not CPU, but video card. You notebook has 2 video cards, with the idea that slow but cool HD400 works by default, switching to hot and powerful one when needed. (which one do you have by the way? They vary in this model). In Linux, this does not work out of the box, and you always have both video cards on, resulting in maximum heat. If you are OK to go without big GPU, you can just disable bigger video card altogether. Intel HD4000 is a rather tough guy itself - it can handle HD video and all 2010 games quite well. Otherwise, search for instruction on how to tweak NVIDIA Optimus if you have NVIDIA, or PowerXPress if you have Radeon. These are the names of technologies that use 2 video cards to save power.

Answer 3

sudo apt-get install powertop

sudo apt-get install pm-utils

Both of them are power monitoring tools , try using powertop as its developed by intel. Check kernel version.. i rolled back to stable kernel 3.12 from unstable inbuilt 3.13 kernel and my battery life has improved a little.

http://worldofenggcodes.blogspot.com/2014/05/for-all-people-with-power-problems.html

Answer 4

You can use powertop to see which programs are running in the background and are using most of the CPU memory.
You can even stop some of the background services to stretch your battery life, you can do it by manually stopping each and every services on terminal or you can use a simple bash script for it...

#!/bin/bash

##############                 Stop Services                         #############
##################################################################################
#   This is just a bash script to stop services                                  #
#   to stretch your battery life.                                                #
#   Note: You can undo all these things by just rebooting your PC.               #
#   Services to be stopped are : ssh,apache2,mysql,bluetooth,cups,apparmor       #
#                                and other services if you want !!               #
##################################################################################

# Require super user permissions 

##################################################################################
#                          1) Stop ssh:                                          #
                       sudo service ssh stop
                 echo "SSH Service stopped successfully !!";
echo "##########################################################################";

##################################################################################
#                          2) Stop apache2:                                      #
                      sudo service apache2 stop
                 echo "Apache2 Service stopped successfully !!";
echo "##########################################################################";

##################################################################################
#                          3) Stop mysql:                                        #
                      sudo service mysql stop
                 echo "MySQl Service stopped successfully !!";
echo "##########################################################################";

##################################################################################
#                          4) Stop bluetooth:                                    #
                      sudo service bluetooth stop
                 echo "Bluetooth Service stopped successfully !!";
echo "##########################################################################";

##################################################################################
#                          5) Stop cups:                                         #
                      sudo service cups stop
                 echo "Cups Service stopped successfully !!";
echo "##########################################################################";

##################################################################################
#                          6) Stop apparmor:                                     #
                      sudo service apparmor stop
                 echo "Apparmor Service stopped successfully !!";
echo "##########################################################################";

Just save this file as battery_saver.shand run bash battery_saver.sh on terminal.
There are other linux services that can be stopped to increase your battery life.
Before running this script check your discharge rate (which is in Watt) in powertop and compare it with new discharge rate after running. It may have reduced to some amount.

You can start the services again just by replacing stop with start in the same file.
There are some kernel modules running in background, you can always check by lsmod and can unload them for a while to stretch your battery life even more.
Some of them are : usb_storage, webcam drivers, wireless, bluetooth and many more.