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With win7 I had about 4hrs battery life. My battery was fully charged and I had my laptop plugged in during the entire install of ubuntu. However, about 15 minutes after unplugging my laptop I get a message that says I only have 19 minutes of battery left. So now instead of 4 hours of battery I only have 45 minutes max. WTF?

Everything I've researched so far seems to say things like "change your power settings" "dim your screen" etc. But none of these 'solutions' would in anyway account for a missing 3 hours of battery life.

So is this an issue with the battery monitor itself? How do I fix this? I came to Ubuntu because I'm starting to learn some programming and my win7 was gettting too buggy. I really don't want to go back now that I've seen what ubuntu is, but I can't function with only a half hour battery that I KNOW will last at least 3 hours. Please help!

Jorge Castro
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Arammil
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1 Answers1

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So, after lots of research from multiple websites and hours of reading (and no help from this post): Here is what I used to increase my battery life from 45min to 2:15 fully charged. Installed the following programs Powertop Laptop Mode Tools Jupiter

I then figured out how to enable Intel i915 RC6 by using the following commands:

gksudo nautilus

which enabled me to have root access to the /etc/default/grub file that I then modified the following lines

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

to:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash i915.i915_enable_rc6=1"

and then used the terminal command:

sudo update-grub

Next I uninstalled all programs I was not using or would not use (including all the default media applications which I replaced with VLC) especially anything related to "bluetooth" as I have no bluetooth devices.

I also made sure that beagle and updatedb are disabled such that they won't consume unnecessary power.

I managed to do all of this after literally hours of reading about how to properly use the terminal, multitudes of google searches, and a composition notebook now half filled with terminal commands and lists of apps.

Ultimately I feel as though powertop, laptop mode tools, and jupiter are all basically doing the same thing from different angles and should all just be things that Ubuntu already should have, but that would just be crazy wouldn't it?

Jorge Castro
  • 73,717
Arammil
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