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I have a Lenovo Z50-70 Laptop with dual boot between Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. The battery lasts for about 6 hours on Windows but lasts only 2.5 hrs or less on Ubuntu. Since the difference is substantial, it doesn't seem normal to me.

I think it is some driver issue but I don't know how to solve it. I've already read this post but it didn't help. Any suggestions?

lspci -k | grep -EA2 'VGA|3D':

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0b)
Subsystem: Lenovo Device 380d
Kernel driver in use: i915
--
03:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GM108M [GeForce 840M] (rev a2)
Subsystem: Lenovo Device 380d
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Raman
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1 Answers1

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You have hybrid graphics. Both adapters are powered all the time and that is way battery life is low. Nvidia adapter is new. So you need to install drivers. Run in terminal

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-352 nvidia-prime
sudo add-apt-repository -r ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa

and reboot.

If the driver installs OK, you will be able to switch Intel and Nvidia adapters in Nvidia Settings program. And power consumption must be much lower in Intel.

In your current state Nvidia adapter is always powered but not used by the system because opensource driver does not support it. So it is just waste of power.

Pilot6
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