Ubuntu’s battery life has been a bone of contention with me ever since making the switch from Windows a while ago, and it seemed that there was no real fix for this. But perhaps there is.

My trusty HP zt3000 has been able to consistently give me an hour and a half when running under any flavour of Windows XP, but never more than 50 minutes under Ubuntu. I’ve tried everything from running with maximum powersave enabled, turning the processor down as much as it would go, putting the LCD on the absolute lowest setting, and even praying to whatever diety might hear my case. All to no avail … 50 minutes was the most I could expect under Ubuntu 7.10.

But something happened recently and I’m now able to consistently get over an hour and a half of life while running the Human-friendly version of Linux. How did I do this? I’m glad you asked.