- Forget all snazzy desktop stuff. Especially those that update the screen unnecessarily.
- Try this: http://lesswatts.org .
- If you have a IBM THinkpad check out this one too: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_reduce_power_consumption
Then also try these tips :
- In Firefox: disable prefetch. For that :
- In urlbar type about:config
- In the resulting table.. type "prefetch" in the search box to filter out those keys that have "prefetch" in them.
- In the result, set "network.prefetch-next" to "false".
- If you have Stumbleupon installed, disable it's prefetch too. stumbleupon.somenumber.prefetch
- Unless you are a heavy user of gmail, use the simple html mode.
- Use text based browsers unless the page demands a GUI browser. Elinks is an excellent choice.
- Disable anything that blinks/ updates the screen. This makes X wake up the CPU on every update.
- Disable blinking cursors. Many terminals allow a way to disable the blinking of the cursor.
- Disable the "seconds" indicator on the clock. Really, are you on a race track ?
- Disable "system monitor" "battery monitor" and such other applets. Configure key shortcuts that run a command like "uptime" "date" "acpi" or somthing like that and pipe it to xmessage or something like that. Also havea script that .. every 30 seconds call these commands and checks for dangerous values. If any, popout a xmessage.
- Have a decent amount of RAM. This reduces the kernel having to wake the hard disk often to play with the swap.
- Remove anything unnecessary. Unnecessary daemons, Unnecessary devices, Unnecessay drivers, etc..
- I dont know if this works: Try using small flash based drives to store frequently used small documents, music, etc. This brings disk usage to a minimum.
