Hello guys,

I would like to ask about a matter that spins in my mind for quite a while. It regards power saving features on laptops. My current wireless laptop can go almost for 3hrs if I just surf the web and listen to music, but only if I use Windows (and I don't use it any more). When I boot Linux and even manually degrade processor to 50%, it barely lasts more than 1 hour. Yes, I know lowering processor power is not enough and that's why I want to ask this:
what other power saving tweaking may I use in order to prolong the time I run on battery?

I'm not talking about doing resource intensive task, just when it comes to browsing the web, sending email etc.

I would like to know, if there are some generic things I can do – that's why I'm not including specs of my system (maybe just that it has wireless run via by ndiswrapper and nvidia gpu). I think just posting some hints would be enough so that I know what to look for.

Not sure if this shouldn't be posted on a more generic forum, but Slackware has been my only distribution since I've left Windows behind and I always found this community very helpful.

Any help would be appreciated

It depends on what laptop you have. For example there are laptop-specific drivers that allow you to lower screen brightness, power off various devices, and other power saving features. What brand laptop do you have ? Is it the acer in your sig ?

EDIT:
A good place to start, look in the kernel Documentation and read 'laptop-mode.txt'

See here:
http://www.samwel.tk/laptop_mode/laptop_mode/

yes, it's Acer Aspire 1362WLMi, though I'm getting a new Aspire 5920G next month.

that's what i'm actually interested in - "power off various devices, and other power saving features" (screen brightness decreases automatically when running on battery).

In general, the tricks involve using cpufreq, using a modern kernel with dynamic ticks and other powersaving measures, and tuning a little bit the behaviour of some apps and the filesystem driver. You should download powertop (slackbuild) and run it a little bit, as it will give you advice on what to set up and tune. It's also a good idea to turn off the wireless card while you're not using it.

Thank you, i'll check that link. Looks promising after the first glance.

It doesn't seem that there are any laptop-specific tweaks for acer laptops. Either way laptop-mode mostly lets you spin down your hard-drive and spin it back up later when things that need to be written or read accumulate. Unfortunately drive lifetime is measured in spinups, so, perhaps it is best not to use this option extensively.