When you are using your laptop on the battery supply, you want it to last as long as it can. There are some tweaks that can be done on an Ubuntu system that will help you run your battery more efficiently so that you can get more battery life out of your laptop.
The first thing to use is the built in power management tool. This will give your computer some instructions about what to do with hibernating, turning on and off the screen, and a few other options. The point is that you can set your computer to run a bit more friendly on battery power to get a little more life out of it if need be.
Download the program called PowerTOP. This is a free download in the package manager. When you run this, you will see which parts of the computer are using the most battery power. Simply turn those things off if you can to optimize your machine to run more efficiently.
Dim your screen. While it might not seem like a big change this will give you more battery life.
Be sure to turn your sound off for the most battery power possible. If not, keep the sound lower.
Try to install the updates that are available for Ubuntu. Some of these have improved battery because the software and hardware work a bit better with each other.
Unplug devices from the computer that you don’t need. If you have a USB stick that you aren’t accessing for example, be sure that you aren’t using it at all when running on just the battery.
Try using a limited number of applications. If you leave multiple applications running but not in use, these will drain the battery. Shut off the things that are not in use so that you can get longer battery life.
