I've been using Ubuntu on my desktop for ages and having built three UserOS operating systems for Australian PC User magazine during the year, I'm pretty familiar with how it works. But over the last couple of days, I've bitten the bullet and loaded it on my notebook - well, Xubuntu actually - but the one thing I miss is Windows XP's simple power management tools.

Yep, Xubuntu has the basic gnome-power-manager, which is great for all the macro management but it doesn't have anything for CPU throttling and certainly no quick user interface.

My notebook has a 1.6GHz Intel Pentium-M processor inside and on the previous Windows XP Pro operating system, it routinely gave me three hours' battery life, mostly by throttling the CPU clock speed down from 1.6GHz to just 600MHz. It doesn't sound like much but for word processing and basic spreadsheet work, 600MHz was more than enough.

[read more at www.darrenyates.com.au ]

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