conserve battery in gnome when the system is idle with a little tweak

I recently bought a new lenovo laptop and decided to install Linux mint 7 on it along with vista.Every thing worked fine by default.I started tweaking the system so that i could achieve longer battery life,and i wanted to post my experiences ,thus this post.This should work well for all gnome desktops.At first i couldn’t change the time when the display goes to sleep when idle,to less than 11 minutes as you can see below:

by default

But this can changed easily by changing the idle time in gnome screen saver preferences,just open screensaver from system->preferences menu.

by default

change the “Regard the computer as idle after:” slider from 10 minutes to your liking,i changed it to 1 minute as below:

changed to 1 minute.

now computer is regarded as idle after 1 minute and open power management preferences ,now you can reduce the “put display to sleep when inactive for:” slider to upto 2 minutes.As display is the major power consumer in the laptop you can put it to sleep quicker to save more power,when ever you are away.

slider can now be reduced upto 2 minutes

For more power management options install and run powertop application and it will suggest some options to further reduce power consumption and you can also identify which applications often wake the cpu from idle,also note that it will be useful only when you have an intel® cpu.For further information on power conservation in linux visit http://www.lesswatts.org/

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