Has anyone noticed that Ubuntu's battery life is nothing compared to Vista's. I've bought a laptop, called the Acer timeline which advertises more than 8 hours of battery life, but all I can get is 3 and a half.

All of the articles I've read about extending battery life involve sacrificing something important such as usb automount, cd rom polling or enabling usb auto suspend. Does anyone know of a better way to significantly increase battery life as powertop only gives me one thing and less watts is confusing.