Learn how to prolong your battery working time!
I hope you are all OK today. I will tell you a short story about batteries and Ubuntu/Kubuntu. In this tutorial i will tell some little secrets and truths from my personal experience and from other people's experiences. This is strictly about how to spare resources and extend you battery power between to charges.
So lets begin.
First thing i want to tell you is that Windows has better battery manager than Ubuntu/Kubuntu. I can not tell you the reason but in my experience, and according to other people, battery always lasts longer on Windows. Some people say that the reason for this is because Ubuntu is more desktop oriented rather than laptop. And that is quite possible. So if you see in Windows that your battery can last for four hours do not be surprised if in Ubuntu you see three hours. At the moment it is just like that.
For me there are four important thing that influence battery power - screen brightness, HDD usage, wireless and processor activity.
Screen brightness
Each and every laptop has options for screen brightness adjusting. In order to extend battery power lower your screen brightness to what is acceptable for you. In Kubuntu for example you have three power profiles in battery mode - powersave, aggressive powersave and extreme powersave. For each of them you have defined brightness level.
Conclusion: Keep your brightness on visually reasonable level. It is stupid to save to much if you can not see anything :)
HDD usage
HDD is one of the biggest battery consumers. Probably you have noticed that normally you HDD lamp is not blinking that often except when you are running programs for the first time, listening music or watching videos... That is because after you start program for the first time it is in your RAM memory. In order to save battery power it is good to have bigger RAM memory. Normally laptops with eg 512MB of RAM will consume more energy because of constant loading new contents in RAM memory. So if you have some extra money put it on RAM memory. :)
Conclusion: Try not to start new programs all the time, try to avoid watching videos and playing music. Try not to cut and copy big files from one place to another.
Wireless
I will not explain this to much since it is pretty self-explanatory. I can confirm that without wireless my battery lasted 10-15% longer.
Conclusion: Since you are using laptop i would be very stupid to say turn off your wireless and use cable for internet :) But in the case that you do not need wireless or you just do not have access to any AP turn it off and your battery will last longer.
Processor activity
Processor is also a big consumer. If you want battery juice to last longer be sure not to use processes which are to demanding. Also notice that Flash and Java applications are very CPU demanding. That means do not exaggerate with youtube videos :) and online video games. Be aware that if you talk via skype, camera also pushing processor up. I believe that you know that video editing, animation or picture rendering and some demanding processes in photo editing may be CPU consuming.
Conclusion: Avoid Flash and Java applications, online videos, picture or animation rendering, video editing and huge and complex operations in photo editing.
I read somewhere that 64bit systems are using more RAM memory and less CPU than 32bit systems. If this is true then 64bit are better than 32bit for laptop users. I can not give you explanation why but like i said i read it somewhere and it is not necessary to be absolute truth. :)
Well i hope this will help someone. This is just my response to one of the question i got on my chat.
Generally this might be useful for Windows users as well but they should exclude the part about processor and java and flash applications.
More tips about laptop batteries you can find you click here. you will see very useful instructions about how to prolong healthy period of your battery and how to use the most of it.
Enjoy,
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