Powertop was created by Lesswatts.org with the sole purpose of helping users find those programs and/or systems that are using too much power. The end result? More battery life for you to enjoy. Power top is easy to install and use. Powertop is a curses-based application so it is run inside of a terminal very much like the Top application. Don’t expect a fancy GUI here, it’s text-based but still user-friendly. In this article you will find out how to install Powertop and use it to get the most out of your battery.

Installing Powertop

So long as you are using a modern release, you should find Powertop in your distributions’ repositories. And since Powertop is a terminal-based application, I will illustrate how to install via command line.

The steps are simple:

1. Open up a terminal window.
2. Issue the command sudo install powertop.
3. Click ‘y’ to okay the installation.

That’s it. Powertop is now ready for you to use.

Using Powertop

Figure 1

With your terminal still open issue the command sudo powertop to start the application. You can not run Powertop as the standard user because Powertop has to collect and modify information that the standard user has no access to. Fortunately sudo will do the trick.

What you see will differ, depending upon your distribution, installation, configuration, etc.

As you can see ,in Figure 1, Powertop has a few suggestions to aid my laptop. The biggest issue is wakeups and Powertop is giving me the top causes for wakeups.

As you can also see, Powertop offers suggestions to solve the various problems. Not only does Powertop make suggestions, it will offer to take care of the suggestion for you. In the instance above you can see Powertop is suggesting I disable the hal system from polling my CD drive. You can do this with the command:

hal-disable-polling –device /dev/cdrom

or you can just hit the ‘K’ key and Powertop will take care of this for you.

Once you take care of this suggestion (whether you let Powertop take care of it or you do it manually) Powertop will then suggest another way for you get more power from your laptop and will offer to take care of the issue for you. You can continue on like this until Powertop has resolved every issue it can find.

Final thoughts

Powertop is an effective means of helping your laptop gain more battery life without having to recompile a kernel, manually edit a configuration file, or issue any commands (outside of starting the application). After following the suggestions of Powertop you should experience a noticeable difference in your battery life.

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It is easy to switch to detailed information which add information about the total, designed and active capacity of the laptop in mWh, the charge and discharge rate of the laptop battery, the tension, wear level and last calibration date.

One of the most interesting functions of Battery Care is without doubt the monitoring of the battery’s discharge cycle. The program will suggest a full battery recharge every 30 discharge cycles. The software to manage laptop batteries can also be configured to automatically switch power plans based on the power source of the laptop.

The remaining battery time and charge percentage is displayed as a icon in the Windows system tray with additional information being displayed in a popup. Battery Care is an excellent laptop battery manager for the Windows operating system. It can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

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BattCursor adds another battery monitoring possibility for computer systems running the Windows Vista operating system. The free software program displays the remaining battery power next to the mouse cursor so that it is always in sight.

The colors of the mouse cursor change at thresholds to inform the user about the battery status. A red cursor for instance indicates a low battery while a green cursor indicates that lots of battery power is remaining.

Battcursor requires the Microsoft Windows operating system and the .net Framework 2.0 or higher. It comes with a few additional settings that can extend the battery life of the laptop further. This includes dimming the computer display or turning of Aero.

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A better notebook battery monitor is Power Meter Plus. The software is completely free for private use. It can be installed or used as a portable application and runs fine on all Windows operating systems prior to Windows Vista. So every Microsoft operating system that has been released after Windows 3.11 and before Windows Vista should be able to run this little application without problems.

Power Meter Plus will display a battery monitor in the left and / or right corner of the computer screen. That power meter appears gradually over time as the power levels drop and will be more prominent the less it gets. The meter will automatically move to the left or right side of the screen depending on the position of the computer mouse.

A few settings are provided that can be used to configure the notebook battery monitor. The critical battery level and the level when it is seen as full can be defined. It is furthermore possible to change the drain and charging colors and to display messages when the critical battery level is reached or when the power source is switched.

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Vista Battery Saver is a software program that has been specifically designed to deal with the issue of faster battery drain in Windows Vista. It gives the user options at hand to turn off the Windows Aero interface and the Windows Vista Sidebar.

Options are to turn off the features whenever the laptop is running on battery, to keep the function activated or to turn it off whenever the battery level reaches a set limit. Vista Battery Saver provides access to the Vista power plans which can be configured from within the interface.

Users who are unsure if the Vista Battery Saver application is reducing battery drain on their laptop running Windows Vista should do the following: Clock the time it takes to completely drain the laptop’s battery without running Vista Battery Saver, charge the battery again and do the same with the application running. It is important to perform the same tasks – or none at all – to be able to compare the results.

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That’s usually not a problem unless the applications used demand lots of cpu power. That’s not the case when surfing the Internet, creating spreadsheets or writing a Word document. Both Intel and AMD provide techniques that reduce the cpu frequency of the laptop.

SpeedswitchXP is a small applet sitting in the system tray that makes use of those techniques. It provides access to four settings: Max. performance, Battery optimized, Max. battery and dynamic switching.

Max. performance is the default setting for the laptop. The cpu is running at full speed with it. Battery optimized reduces CPU speed while max. battery reduces the cpu speed even further for maximum battery capacity. Dynamic switching is the last option which dynamically changes the cpu frequency depending on demand.

SpeedswitchXP is an old software program. It was updated in 2006 the last time but it should work fine with several relatively new cpus like Intel’s core duo series.

Users who have used Intel’s Speedstep application for Windows 9x, ME and 2000 in the past will see many similarities between the two applicatons. SpeedswitchXP is providing additional options on the other hand and support for Windows XP.

Is it working for the cpu build into your laptop? I honestly cannot answer that question. The best bet is to try it out and see if it works.

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