Monitor your laptop power consumption with PowerTop

So one thing I have recently been complaining about is how running Ubuntu 7.10 on my HP nc6400 laptop tends to frustrate me because of the power consumption issues I have been having. The system runs hot, the an is always blowing hard, and the battery is only lasting for about an hour and 5 minutes.

When I run Windows XP SP2 PRO on it, I tend to get about 2 hours and 15 minutes, and it stays very cool. I have run the same tasks with both operating systems from surfing the web, ripping movies, running multiple applications and compiling. So I was stoked to find this cool little application called “PowerTop” today.

PowerTOP has these four basic goals:

• Show how well your system is using the various hardware power-saving features
• Show you the culprit software components that are preventing optimal usage of your hardware power savings
• Help Linux developers test their application and achieve optimal behavior
• Provide you with tuning suggestions to achieve low power consumption

I hope this helps you determine what applications or procceses are taking over your lappy.

You can download PowerTop here.

If you are running Ubuntu, you can install it by doing the following:

$sudo apt-get install subversion

$svn checkout http://powertop.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ powertop

cheers,

~j