Ubuntu
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Half the battery life compared to windows7

Asked by Michael Mayr

A few days ago I installed ubuntu 12.04 on my "new" laptop.

I turned off the 2nd graphic card (via vgaswitcheroo) because of the overheating bug.

Now everything works fine... but in ubuntu the battery life is just 3h and in windows7 its up to 6-7h.

Is that normal? I thought ubuntu would need less energy than windows.

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

Because the manufacturers have worked incredibly closely with Windows to make the drivers and support. There is software for Windows which simply isn't in Ubuntu or has been made available (as far as I can tell as you have completely left out the make and model of the system....)

If companies either use open standards for power, or provide Linux drivers etc then the systems will perform similarly, unfortunately there are a lot of proprietary standards out there for power (Alienware and Sony especially do this) so the performance under anything but WIndows will be less due to Linux being treated as a 2nd class OS.

I suggest you report a bug and the community may pick up where your manufacturer fell short. I suggest in future to not only avoid the VGA switcheroo mess which is not very supported in Linux (again due to shortcomings of manufacturers / nvidia /amd) but also see if you can find a pre-installed Ubuntu system which will work fully.

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