Green, power reduction, and climate change are all the rage these days, and the world of computers is not off the hook on this one. Software and hardware manufacturers are trying hard to keep power consumption down - while first something for mostly mobile computers, desktops and servers are now part of the effort too. PC World tested Windows Server 2008 and two Linux server offerings and compared their power usage patterns.
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Member since:2007-09-06
It may be interesting to compare your Ubuntu too XP on the same machine. I'm a Mandriva user myself, I only mention it because XP seems to be closer too par based on hardware needs and sp3 should have all the latest power saving goodness in it.
As for the mention of tinkering in the article, that's about where I am. I just turned powersaving off through KDE after consistantly coming home to a hung machine since turning it on. Dumping down the needed powersaving tweaking for the average users would insure that us above average users have no issues getting adjustments right.
(My specific grief may be bad ram instead and if it is; blast you Bullistics, I'm going back to OCZ 
)
Member since:2008-06-03
@ jabbotts
Sorry mate,
As of 2 days ago, my main laptop is Linux only. I reinstalled Ubuntu over the whole drive.
The second one is actually a dual-boot Vector Linux and WinXP sp2 box (forgot to mention it, sorry) and Vector manages to get about 20 minutes more out of it. It's an old laptop though and I've never done battery calibration on it.... and Vector is a very lightweight distro to begin with.... so it's probably not a fair comparison.
Doubt I'll be getting sp3 though. I don't need Windows for anything now. I use a Mac Pro for my job and will probably use open source software hereon for other stuff. (the only reason I continued relying on Windows was because the codec pack I needed to watch my hi-def Japanese anime was windows only and VLC for Mac wasn't cutting it, but that was before I discovered the awesome MPlayer for Linux)
Cheers.
Edited 2008-06-11 16:19 UTC
Member since:
2008-06-03
Well, I don't run a server and I don't do 'scientific' tests or other techno mumbo-jumbo, but my laptops seems to have slightly longer battery life with Ubuntu and Vector Linux compared to Vista....Heh! Not so surprising considering the hard-drive light is nearly always blinking when running Vista.