Battery Life when running Linux; better or worse than XP?

I wanted to know if the battery life would be positive/negatively affected by switching to Linux from XP Home on my D420. I was thinking about using the Ubuntu release or else some release which would be easy for first time Linux users.

 

That really depends on how deep you're willing to go in configuring your system. In my experience, linux has more power management options available at the outset than Windows XP, but it takes some highly involved tinkering to utilize all of them.

A "smart" distro like Ubuntu will automate much of it for you, and should be able to match Windows XP's power management right after a clean install, but that depends on how well Ubuntu detects your hardware.

 

When I had Hardy running on my Compaq F750US, I was seeing anywhere from 15-25 minutes better battery life depending on what I was doing.

 

I saw a little bit worse life running Ubuntu on my T60 -- but I didn't really fool with any of the settings much.

 

I mainly surf the web (battery life not overly important here; my 9-cell lasts very long) and watch movies during flights (this is the big one). I also have 1.5 GB of Ram atm, but this will be upgraded soon to >2.5. If I wanted to turn my D420 into a one trick pony for watching movies during long flights (6 to 12 hours each), is there a better build for maximum battery life while allowing me to watch movies (off my HD; not the DVD drive)?

 

You could throttle the processor lower than the standard 800 MHz during the movie. I'm not sure how much that would help though.

 

You could change the cpufreq governor from "ondemand" to "powersave". That will keep your processor at the lowest energy state supported by SpeedStep.

 

The video card should also have power saving options. My ATi card has 3 settings, and I run it on the minimum all the time except gaming. It keeps the system cool and prolongs the battery life by over an hour compared to max video settings. Plus watching movies doesn't really load your card, so the performance should not suffer.

There's also a utility called "powertop" by Intel, it shows you which processes wake up the CPU most. If you really want to squeze the maximum battery life, then you should look into that. My old Dell lappy (15", ati x1400, c2d 2Ghz, 3gb ram) manages over 4 hours with a 9 cell battery, with screen at medium and WiFi on (used to be just over 5 hours a year ago when the battery was new)... I tried doing the same under XP and there was no way - it always had at least half an hour less of battery life