From skvidal.
If you haven’t seen powertop yet, you’ve got to look into it. Arjan van de Ven, one of the linux kernel hackers and an employee of Intel, released powertop back in May. What is powertop? Think of the Unix “top,†but monitoring power, not CPU, usage. It tells you how long you are spending in different CPU states, how long at different CPU frequencies, what is waking up the CPU most frequently, and best of all, it makes recommendations for saving power.
Powertop has already identified a number of issues in various software packages and these problems are now being addressed. In my personal case, I found that powertop didn’t help much since I was running an old kernel on an old distribution (FC4 – I know, I know). So I upgraded my laptop to FC7. Before the upgrade, I got about 2 – 2.5 hours on battery. With the upgrade and following the recommendations, I can now get 3.5 hours!
very cool.