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I have an acer 5742G laptop with the Nvidia 540M graphics card. After I upgraded to 11.04 I have been experiencing serious battery and overheating issue. Up until 10.10 I was able to put this thing on my lap and use it for straight 3 hours maximum. But now it has been reduced to half. Power top shows I am using 20-24W power, while previously it never exceeded 15W. I presume the reason is something to do with Nvidia graphics card. I had not installed anything for the graphics card in 10.10 but did so in 11.04 right after the install. How do I totally turn off the whole thing and be sure my graphics card is not using any power. I got that card just to play games and that I do on windows, most the compiling I need is done at a good rate by my i3 processor and most of the time I am browsing and checking email. I do not need that graphics card to do anything. If this mean I have to downgrade to Ubuntu classic or Unity 2D that would not be a problem.

Another thing is powersave usually gives this

The program 'rs:main Q:Reg' is writing to file 'syslog' on /dev/sda7.
This prevents the disk from going to powersave mode.

Is there a solution to this?

Please tell how to I make sure my graphics card does not receive any power.

Luis Alvarado
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Rick_2047
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  • you may be suffering from this issue: http://askubuntu.com/questions/38117/battery-life-decreased-after-upgrade-to-11-04 – fossfreedom May 28 '11 at 12:05
  • @fossfreedom I don't think so, for that to happen powertop should show Load Balancing Tick and Kworker as chief reasons for system wakeup. But according to powertop, on my system its plugin-containe which is present for the most wakeups on an average 35% wakeups are from plugin-containe.

    Or maybe I am wrong, I just looked at the powertop output for 10 mins and saw that load balancing tick does appear but [i915] also appears every single time.

     – Rick_2047 May 28 '11 at 12:21

1 Answers1

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If this is a hybrid graphics laptop, try to install bumblebee to have both the Intel and Nvidia cards working simultaneously, and use gnome-display-properties for multi-screen configurations, which is better than nvidia twinview these days: https://launchpad.net/~hybrid-graphics-linux

sudo apt-get install git
# type password
git clone http://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee.git
cd bumblebee/
sudo ./install.sh
optirun glxgears
# check the speed and compare to running:
glxgears
# If you have google-chrome installed, you can try it with/without optirun and report the FPS values on the mailing list:
optirun google-chrome http://webglsamples.googlecode.com/hg/aquarium/aquarium.html
719016
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