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I am absolutely new to the LINUX platform, since I just migrated to Ubuntu 13.10 from Windows8. I installed powertop so that I could assess my processor. The Tunables window of the output returned by the $ sudo powertop command really came as a shock to me. Most of the entries were bad. Do I need to be worried? Is there something I should do about it? Please suggest

Ghosal_C
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I know this is an old question, but I had the same one, and did a little research and experimentation, the results of which I thought I would share here.

First of all, I don't think you need to be worried by the scary "BAD" label, but it shouldn't hurt to toggle them to GOOD.

For me, my battery discharge rate was around 25-30 W. I randomly toggled 3 or 4 of the BAD settings to GOOD, and the rate dropped down to 10-12 W. I then decided to go all in and use the command sudo powertop --auto-tune which changes all the BAD settings to GOOD. This brought my discharge rate down to the 8-10 W range, dropped my temp down by about 10 degrees, and brought the remaining battery life estimate up by about an hour.

I am also new to Linux, so I am not sure about the consequences of changing these settings, but I am willing to take a chance because I am using an old laptop with a bad battery which instantly exhibited better performance with the help of powertop. That is just my personal experience. Also, see here for a better, more detailed answer to a similar question.

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