boost your Linux running laptop's power savings - PowerTop, laptop-mode-tools

Often, people find their laptop running linux consuming more power compared to windows. Mostly this is so because, it a luxury that Linux offers you, to install on any kind of hardware. People would purchase  Windows installed Laptops, those that do not officially support Linux. But you will remove windows and Linux immediately and it works !!! , except few issues like more power consuption, or fan running with high speed etc..

Anyways, there are couple outstanding utilities out there to help you balance the power usage on your laptops(these utils work for desktops also, but relatively these are more helpful in tuning your laptops ).

PowerTOP
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How to Install:
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sudo apt-get install powertop

How to run:
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:~$ sudo powertop

the output is an interactive window that looks like below,

The Overview shows which process/device consuming how much power. With this you can make out which process/device is using the power most and take corrective actions accordingly.

Use arrow keys(left and right) to navigate between each of the tabs on the console.

The second tab, "idle stats' shows cpu wise and core wise (including hyperthreads) idle state.

The third tab 'frequency stats' shows frequency wise power usage statistics.

Fourth tab 'Device stats' shows which physical device is consuming power most.

Fifth tab 'tunables' shows configurable paramters that we can tune to improve the power savings. 

To get realistically what needs to be done to increase power savings, run

:~$ sudo powertop --html

This will create an html file called powertop.html. It looks like below

If you see the above window, it will exactly tell what you need to do. You have to update certain kernel config files with certain values as shown. Doing this will improve the power usage.

Also, if you don't want to take all that headache, you can keep the laptop running in battery mode(unplug the power cable) and run

:~$ sudo powertop --calibrate

This will calibrate the system by doing all the necessary tunings.

laptop-mode-tools:

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This is another tool that lets you do efficient power management on the laptop. Run

$~: sudo apt-get install laptop-mode-tools

This will install the utility as startup app by default. Hence you do not have to worry about starting it everytime when you turn on the laptop. The configuration file will be in 

/etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf

If you make any update to this file, run 

$~: service laptop-mode reload

for the changes to take effect.

For more info on this tool, refer

 https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Laptop_Mode_Tools