Maximising laptop battery life

[Chris Green]

On Sat, Feb 08, 2014 at 01:18:49PM -0500, Doug wrote:
> >>Is she likely to get longer battery life with a text editor rather than
> >>a word processor?
> >You've not specified specification, pre- or post-upgrade, so it is a
> >little hard to say.
> >
> >Does it have enough RAM to run Ubuntu, LibreOffice & any background
> >apps without swapping to disk? If so, no, there will probably not be
> >any measurable difference. Swapping hits battery much more heavily
> >than most other things.
> >
> >
> One would think that a solid state hard drive would use less power.
> (But I don't know.) Also, that an XFCE or LXDE desktop would use less power.
> Perhaps someone reading here knows those things.

Actually *measuring* power consumption with a watt meter I've never seen
much significant variation in power consumption according to what's
running.  You might see plus or minus 5 watts or so on a system
consuming 100 watts (fairly typical PC) but that's all. 

It's very, very rarely that anything one does really stretches the
processor's computing power.

The difference between running LibreOffice and nothing will be
insignificant.


-- 
Chris Green