How to reduce power consumption
Reducing system power consumption will extend battery life, reduce system temperature and (on some models) reduce system fan noise. This page summarizes the known techniques for reducing power consumption on ThinkPad laptops under Linux.
Contents
System power states
CPU
Graphics
- How to make use of Graphics Chips Power Management features
- Problem with high power drain in ACPI sleep
- Rovclock
- Reduce LCD brightness
- Disable CRT output
Hard disk
Optical drive
- Eject the UltraBay optical drive, or just turn off its power supply (i.e., run the appropriate eject script but leave the drive inserted). This saves close to 1W.
System fan
Wireless network
- Activate power saving on the wireless network card
- For Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Mini-PCI Adapter and Intel PRO/Wireless 2915ABG Mini-PCI Adapter, see instructions for the ipw2200 driver.
Related toptics
External resources
- Power Management Guide from the Gentoo Linux documentation
- When/where/what for low power consumption? (thread on Linux-Thinkpad)