Linux drains battery extremely fast

[Edd]

The battery in my laptop, under windows, lasts for around an hour and a half. Under linux it manages less than half an hour. I mean generally speaking I am plugged in most of the time but there are times when I need to unplug and I get less than half hour with it unplugged. Is linux just generally really harsh on the battery or is there some thing not playing ball? I've noticed that if I leave the laptop unplugged with no action for around 10 minutes it powers off. And when I say power off I don't mean shut down, it literally just cuts out.

Hope someone can give me a hand with this.

Thanks a lot

[DragonMage]

Usually, in Windows, there are some tricks or programs that makes your laptop into "low power mode" as soon as the adaptor jack is plugged out. This includes lowering the CPU speed, darkening the screen, etc, etc, etc. Linux usually don't do this automatically, so it's still using "plugged in" mode even though the adaptor jack is plugged out.

 

I am not that much of an expert in Linux power management, but I know that ACPI needs to be enabled and acpi and acpid service need to be turned on. To slow down the cpu speed, there is a program called cpufreqd. Other things such as darkening the screen requires a little bit of more work.

[Havin_it]

Another factor can be addon devices. Using USB, PCMCIA etc. devices can drain power anyhoo (my wifi card is a prime example).

 

On Windows these devices have native drivers made by the manufacturer, which include power-management routines to economise on this battery-use.

 

On Linux, the hardware manufacturers often don't make a Linux native driver, and/or won't make enough source available for community-built drivers to fully match the capabilities of the Windows equivalent - power management would be a prime example. So, you will find many of these devices sucking up more battery on Linux.