Poor power management unviable on laptop

[kjo]

I finally installed Ubuntu as the OS on my new lenovo ThinkPad X201 (after using it with Windows 7 for a couple of weeks).

It's my first Ubuntu machine, and I love it. BUT, alas, compared to Windows 7, its power management is awful. So basically I can't really use it as a portable device, since it can't stray too far from an outlet.

So now I'm thinking of maybe switching back to Windows 7, and run Ubuntu in a Virtual Box.

Unless I can find ways to improve the power management.

The most serious problem is that hibernate does not work at all. According to the cell charge statistics, in hibernate mode the battery loses power almost as fast as it does during regular use. In contrast, when I was running Windows 7 on this machine, hibernate mode barely used any power at all.

The second problem is that during regular the battery lasts at most one hour (if that), even when I set my screen's brightness so low that I can barely read it. This is about a third of the time it did when it was running Windows 7.

The laptop has a solid-state drive, so there's no issue with spinning it down.

What else can I do?

TIA!

~kj

[IcarusR]

Powermanagment still is not as good in linux as it is in windows. Battery life is therefore not as good.
I believe this is in part to do with some of the linux drivers not completely supporting all the power saving abilities of the hardware.

There are things that can be done to improve battery life.
Some ideas in these pages

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to...er_consumption

http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/

Lots of info on thinkpads & linux here

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki