Does Ubuntu 11.04 drain ur battery faster than Windows 7???

         The linux kernel 2.6.38 and higher versions have a serious power consumption problem.It consumes more than normal power and hence a shorter battery life and causes the laptop to heatup fast.

                 This problem was noticed by phoronix . and can be easily noticed if you recently migrated from Windows platform to the linux ubuntu platform.

            Here is a workaround you can implement to get the best out of your laptop battery..

                The instructions below will force Active-State Power Management to be enabled by editing the GRUB2 config file and while this should work for most computers, it will not work for all. Also, Phoronix notes that "if your system's BIOS/hardware is in bad shape, you may hit system hangs" though it seems this is not something very common:

1. To force Active-State Power Management to be enabled, you must edit the GRUB2 config file so open a terminal and copy/paste this: 

gksu gedit /etc/default/grub

2. Then, locate the line that looks like this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

(it's on line 11 on my computer) and to the end of the line, before the last quote, add pcie_aspm=force (and a space before it), which should make it look like this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash pcie_aspm=force"

Now double check you've edited the file correctly! Modifying this file incorrectly may cause your computer to stop booting!

3. And finally, update GRUB using the command below:

sudo update-grub

And restart your computer.

If something goes wrong, reverting the changes is pretty easy: simply open "/etc/default/grub" as root and remove "pcie_aspm=force" from the end of the "GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT" line, then run "sudo update-grub".

Images of the test results by phoronix

Thanks to Phoronix for the workaround and gnulinux.cat for the heads up!