Linux Power Management for Laptops vs XP

[corinthos]

I have a Dell 600M laptop and currently run XP Pro on it. I'd like to run Slackware 10.2 or perhaps some other distro on it instead, but I'm wondering if I'd be better off sticking to XP Pro. Whichever will be able to best maximize my battery life when on the go is what I'll ultimately go with. Is Linux power management for laptops now comparable to XP or still lacking? I get between 3-4 hours (estimated) of just regular use on my 6-cell battery under XP Pro right now, if I'm just word processing or surfing the Internet and not playing DVDs.
Curious if I'll get something close to that under Linux. Thanks in advance!

 

[bersl2]

Use a 2.6 kernel, make sure that cpufreq is part of it, and go download and install the laptop-tools software from source.

 

[cleverhandle]

CPU throttling is handled well by current kernels - as bersl2 said, just make sure you have a recent kernel and appropriate tools. If you're really gung-ho about it, you can probably do even better on Linux than on XP because it's easier to run a low-resource desktop and fewer background tasks, though I don't think that would really gain you that much extra time.

Where things get trickier is with the various flavors of suspend/sleep/hibernate support. In theory, most of that is supposed to be standardized by specs like ACPI, but in practice many laptops don't follow the rules to the letter. Chances are that if you have a popular model laptop (like your 600M) that it will work well because someone will have taken to time to make the code work. But the only way to know for sure is to do some research.

If your primary concern is CPU powersaving (for saving power while you're working), Linux should do just as well, if not better than, XP.