There are plenty of things that I love about Linux, but when it comes to maximizing battery life performance, there is very little to desire. On the frontend, you might be running very few applications, but unknown to you, there are actually plenty of applications running in the backend that are quietly draining away your battery. Compiz, workspace, dock are few such examples. As a result, a battery that used to last 3 hours can only last for 2 hours (or less) now.

So what can you do about it?

PowerTOP is an application that allows you to view information about programs that are misbehaving while your computer is idle. With this information, you can then make changes and optimize your computer to squeeze more juice out of your laptop battery.

Needless 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.