have an ancient thinkpad 570e that is (hopefully) in the middle of a successful debian etch install, 2.6.12 kernel. computer has apm; afaik, no acpi support. under mandrake, i got maybe 10 minutes of surfing with a pcmcia card. that was without any power management. hoping to improve on that. and yes, i realize that my battery's probably junk. seems that there are a lot of ways to save power--what are the most important, and how to implement them at boot time?
display--haven't looked into this as my screen has a slide switch to dim
cpu--not sure if any of the throttling (cpudyn, etc) apps will work on my p3; i'll give it a shot.
hard drive--fooled around a bit with hdparm with some success. looking to add this to an init script
pcmcia card--haven't had luck configuring power mgt on this. whenever i set through kde or iwconfig, it doesn't seem to take. i'm wondering if it's a driver issue.

also haven't tried laptop-mode-tools. so what's the magic combo of settings/programs that will take care of all aspects of power management?

Ancient laptop = P3 =

I have a P3 800Mhz laptop and I don't consider it ancient. If I was running windows XP then it probably would be. At least it would be slow.

Anyways, your P3 might support "cpu frequency scaling", but at least mine does not. See my laptop pages at http://users.utu.fi/sjsepp/ for info on different ways to save power.

Also check out laptop listings in these pages to see if somebody has written a howto for your laptop:

www.linux-laptop.net
www.tuxmobil.org