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I have a Sony Vaio E series and I installed both Ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10. In every case, my battery life is reduced of almost a half with respect to Windows 7. The power consumption with no program running is around 18 W, opening Firefox or Thunderbird goes over 30!

I have tried laptop-mode-tools and Jupiter, tweaks on the kernel suggested on the Ubuntu website here, but nothing changed.

I ran powertop, but before studying to understand what it says I read about some Linux regression problems on power consumption. In fact, I have the same problem with Fedora 17 and OpenSuse 12.2 on this laptop. My brother has an Acer and he has the same problem. So, I'd like to know if other people have the same issue, or it is just related to some machines.

Thank you!

Oyibo
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Giovanni
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I have a 14" Asus that gets about the same battery life under Ubuntu as under Windows. It idles at 7.5-8W. I've seen it hit 18W and it might be capable of more. Just casual gaming on it.

PowerSavingTweaks is the gold standard for trimming power as far as I know. Sorry you found no relief there. Have you followed the links in the laptop mode page to other interesting efforts like tuning PM utils?

The worst offender on my Asus is the discrete Nvidia graphics card. There is a well-established effort to get that under control, and I'm grateful to the people behind Bumblebee, without which my laptop would bake itself. I don't know whether it's feasible or even sensible to try to power down a discrete AMD GPU card. Proprietary graphics drivers might help a bit. (apt-get install fglrx-updates and you'll probably have to adjust away "underscan" in the GUI Catalyst Control Center.) Personal experience suggests this would shave off a couple of watts.

Community
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dam
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