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How To Control Your CPU Frequency In Ubuntu

Posted by: Damien on April 10th, 2009
  • 7 Comments
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cpu-frequencyNeedless to say, conserving your battery power is the most important task when you are on the move with your laptop. Other than disabling all unused programs by shutting down them during the startup, one of the great way to save battery power is to reduce the running frequency of your CPU. The slower frequency the CPU runs, the less power it consumes.

In your Ubuntu, you can easily switch your CPU frequency via the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor Gnome-applets.

On the top panel of your desktop, right click your mouse and select “Add to Panel”

In the window that open, scroll down and look for the entry “CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor“. Select the entry and click the Add button to add to the panel.

gnome-applets-panel

You should see something like this:

cpu frequency applets

Next, open up your terminal and type:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets

You will see the following screen.

cpu frequency configuration

Select OK

When prompt if you want to start with root privilege, select Yes.

This will bring you back to your terminal.

Now back to your CPU frequency scaling applet on the top panel, when you click on the icon, it will display a list of frequency that you can choose from. There are also various modes that you can use to allow the system to auto-control the frequency of your CPU.

cpu frequency selection

Depending on the configuration of your laptop, most Intel and AMD CPU are set to be Ondemand mode, which means it will run at the lowest frequency unless you are doing intensive tasks that require the extra power. However, when you are on your battery, it is best to set to Powersave mode so that it will always run at the lowest frequency.

What other ways do you use to save your battery power?


Damien Oh is the owner and chief editor of Make Tech Easier

Tags: CPU frequency, Linux, power saving, Ubuntu
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7 Responses

  • Adrian Nowak says:
    April 11, 2009 at 10:59 am

    On Ubuntu 8.10 and newest You don’t need to reconfigure the applet. The CPU frequency scaling is enabled out-of-box :)

    Reply
  • Vadim P. says:
    April 11, 2009 at 9:14 pm

    I use it daily when on battery power. Pretty great.

    Reply
  • Tsering says:
    April 18, 2009 at 8:37 am

    wow! thanks for your wonderful tips… i wasn’t aware of such things. Great going with the laptop running on battery :)

    Reply
  • techno says:
    May 27, 2009 at 8:05 pm

    is there any similar desktop application for Windows?

    Reply
    • Damien says:
      May 28, 2009 at 6:20 am

      You can try SpeedswitchXP. I have not try it though.

      Reply
      • techno says:
        May 28, 2009 at 7:39 am

        Thank you very much for your reply. I’ll definately try this.

        Reply
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