What eats battery power?

[Alex Mandel]

Harold Johnson wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm wondering which apps and processes typically eat up laptop battery
> power.  (I'm sure this doesn't make a difference, but I'm running
> Xubuntu a Mac PowerBook G3.)  I'm running a very old machine, and it
> probably wouln't run multimedia very well anyway, so I'm thinking of
> staying away from that type of stuff altogether.  The Internet,
> however, is something I can't keep away from, even though I know that
> wireless connections burn battery power fairly well.  Browsers don't,
> though, do they?  Or *do* they?  I haven't installed Flash in Firefox
> yet, for this very reason; I suspect Flash would eat up my battery
> fairly quickly.  I've even switched my Gmail view to basic HTML,
> hoping this might save battery power.
> 
> Any other suggestions?
> 
> Thanks,
> Harold
> 
I concur, drop your screen brightness. In windows although I have yet to 
  try this in linux, muting the sound also saves power. so if you don't 
need sound, stop the sound related dameons too. I've also found the tap 
on click feature of a mousepad to be a power eater vs. button clicking, 
although you may not even have this feature.
Other than that a newer battery. Lithium Ion batteries lose capacity 
over time. A 3 year old Li-ion may hold as little as 20% of the original 
capacity, my friends 5 year old battery lasts 10 minutes on her laptop 
these days, used to be about 2 hours.
Also you may be able to find a higher capacity battery than was 
available for your laptop originally. Advances in tech have made 
batteries more dense, which means more power, same size.
Compare using the Whr on the battery. 96Whr is what you can get on new 
laptops, 66 Whr is more typical of some older ones or even 33Whr on 5 yr+

Alex