Reducing power needs & extending battery life

[Garp]

Thought I'd mention this software as it's one I use regularly. Granola is produced by a company called MiserWare and it aims to reduce a computers power usage by being both more frugal and more responsive than standard OS power management.
Mostly I use this on my *nix boxes, but Kari also happily uses it on Windows. It's simple and effective, mostly just install it and leave it on defaults. The one proviso is I've noticed it having a detrimental effect on performance in games and on video encoding, depending on the application / codec and how it's threaded. It seems to get confused by certain performance patterns and errs on the side of lower clock speeds. It is relatively easy to disable though, so even if you do do high CPU usage tasks you might still like it on your system.
Given a lot of what people do on computers is relatively low powered tasks like browsing, e-mails etc, Granola can save significantly. On newer CPUs it's capable of doing a lot more as chip manufacturers have opened up quite granular controls. On Kari's older laptop it reduces power usage by 20-30%, extending the battery life nicely. On my desktop its reducing power usage by nearly 55% under Ubuntu. Given I'm mostly running stuff on remote boxes, that's ideal.

You can get the software for free here:
http://grano.la/

[Mark]

Would be interesting to see how that does against my own tuning (while on batteries this laptop has no moving parts and competes with iPads for battery life).

[Zirax]

Interesting. Given win 2k7's gimped power settings this sounds ideal for my file server. 90% of the time it will be idling, so anything to reduce power overhead sounds good to me.

[Zirax]

Hmmm, it seems to be aggressively ramping down the cpu.

One of the things I used to do that saved a lot of running costs was to use ATITool. Typically used for overclocking, I stuffed the 2d speeds right down and then turned it up when playing games.