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Questions tagged [powertop]

powertop is a script for reducing power consumption on laptops and desktops running Ubuntu.

powertop Install powertop can be installed by running:

sudo apt-get install powertop

To switch on low power mode:

sudo pm-powersave true

To turn off low power mode:

sudo pm-powersave false

For more information, see this Ubuntu wiki article and man powertop.

86 questions
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How do I make Powertop changes permanent?

I'm on a Compaq 615 and it's fan is loud. Not much you can do about that but I'm trying to keep the CPU/GPU as cool as possible. This is what Powertop has to say: If I change all of them to "good", the changes don't survive a reboot. I added the…
H3R3T1K
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Why do I get this unusual PowerTop readings?

I'm using PowerTop v2.1 in Ubuntu 13.04 and I'm getting some pretty strange readings. I've already run powertop --calibrate too. The main screen reads this: As you can see, the power estimates do add up to about 12.8W, perhaps a bit more. However,…
Alex
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How to limit apps from writing too often and logging too much to disk?

Are there ways to keep this at a minimum or to limit it to only when necessary? This is from powertop. I suppose with Firefox there is not much that can be done unless history/cookies/cache/etc are set to never be saved. The program 'firefox-bin' is…
Marky
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Powertop autotune error - Cannot load from file

I'm trying to perform --auto-tune in powertop, however I get the following error Cannot load from file /var/cache/powertop/saved_parameters.powertop If I browse to that directory the file does exist. I started by running --calibrate first, which…
Kaigo
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How to resolve "unknown op" error with Powertop on Ubuntu 16.04?

when I type: sudo powertop I got the following error: unknown op '{' Model-specific registers (MSR) not found (try enabling CONFIG_X86_MSR). read_msr cpu2 0x60d : No such file or directory Can any one…
Amir Soleymani
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How to understand frequency in powertop

I attached a screenshot from powertop while playing a single video from youtube (360p). I do not know how to understand this page exactly, but from what I see in GHz, I guess it is under high load. My cpu is i7 4702mq with Turbo Boost up to 3.2GHz.…
Кристиян Кацаров
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How do I activate Powertop only when my laptop is running on the battery?

I don't want powertop to reduce performance while my laptop is plugged in.
Anup Doddamane
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How do I install powertop 1.13?

Since Ubuntu 11.10 a version of powertop is in the repository that is by intent aimed for developers. However for me as a user the old "classic" version like 1.13 is better suited. Do you know a download possibility for powertop 1.13 in a deb…
dago
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Wrong measurements obtained in powertop

so i was wondering why power gives 0mW for all the processes that are running in my laptop , even thought some of them needs a lot of computation, here's a screenshot of the output of powertop, thank you.the result obtained in powertop
Afou Lazyboy
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