I finally got ACPI and CPUfreq working on my Emachines M5310 system. I can now keep this laptop from burning a hole in my lap. Now I want to try to stretch the battery life as much as possible. With Win2k I got something close to 3 hours. Mandrake 9.2 and throttled down to 500mhz (from 1800) gives me a little over two hours. What else can I do to stretch things a bit? Is getting the harddrive to spin down a worthwhile cause?

I've read that some of you guys are getting more battery life out of your laptop using Linux over Windows. What did you guys do or not do to achieve this?

my laptop(linux) is a scooch longer lasting under linux through no real contribution from myself. i improved upon that a bit by setting the hd spindown to a short time. not a bother to do, just read man hdparm if you're unsure.