battery life, ubuntu 9.04 ;-(

I`ve been off the internet for a considerable period of time; hence the large number of updates in a single day

13th May 2009
Yes, i`ve been off the internet for quite a while now and this is what i`ve been upto. I use a Lenovo Y410 latop which runs Ubuntu 9.04(64-bit). Previously, i used to have a battery life of about 100 minutes while running Windows Vista(and i expect around 120 minutes for Windows 7);however, i was shocked to find out that the battery life had reduced to only about 50 minutes when running ubuntu.

My initial reaction, was to believe that ALL 64-bit O.S.`s gave a reduced battery live`s(ya, i know that`s a stupid thought; but that`s what came to my mind at first); but then i recalled instances of better power management by 64-bit O.S.`s.

Searching the Ubuntu forums provided me a thread with a considerable number of people stating the same problem as i, myself had. A solution was already provided(which i implemented without haste)along with a link(www.lesswatts.org), which had to be referred to, in case you needed more performance-tweaking.

The site provided excellent information on the various tasks which use up your battery-life and could be disabled in order to save power. The power-saving methods explained on the site, however, were “general” and not for any specific linux distro; which meant i had to find the corresponding tweak in Ubuntu for myself.

I managed to find the location of these files, a lot sooner than i`d expected. The configuration of these files can be tweaked in a lot of ways; the easiest among them being the tweaking the files in the following directory:

/etc/laptop_mode/conf.d/

i`ve put a few scratch-notes i`ve made in the process; i just could`nt type them out again, it`d bore me to death!!
(sorry about all the scribbling, i guess i`m just not patient enough for a good handwriting )

i`m open to learning, so, ideas, criticisms; ALL welcome!