Reduce Laptop Overheating Issues And Improve Battery Life

Just like me, everybody are facing the issues such as overheating and low battery performance in their Laptops/Notebooks. These are the common issues and everybody are suffering with these kind of ridiculous issues alot. So how do you overcome these issues by reducing your laptop overheating and improving battery performance?

Don’t worry, I’ve faced the same problems until i found some cool tricks from Ubuntu Wiki and Ask Ubuntu sites to get rid of them. I won’t say that these will reduce overheating to zero level and increases your battery performance 100% efficient. But i assure you that these methods will cool down your laptop temperature and you will get a reasonable improvement in your battery performance.

Try the following three methods and choose the suitable one for you. I suggest you to use any one of the following tools. If not happy with one tool, just remove it and go for the another one.

1. Install TLP To Reduce Overheating And Improve Battery Performance

We already have a detailed document about how to install and configure TLP in our previous article. Just install tlp and forget it. It will be doing the necessary things to cool down your laptop temperature and improve battery life a bit.

>> How To improve Battery Life And Usage With TLP

2. Install Jupiter To Reduce Overheating And Improve Battery Performance

What is Jupiter?

Jupiter is a Simple, easy to use hardware and power management applet for all i386 and x86_64 Linux laptops, and netbooks. A key component of Fuduntu and the Aurora Linux distribution. It is available from Webupd8 PPA up to Ubuntu 12.10 and is no longer supported for Ubuntu 13.04.

However Jolicloud team has a Jupiter PPA for Ubuntu 13.04 raring and now its working.

Add the Jupiter PPA with command:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jolicloud-team/ppa

Update Sources list:

$ sudo apt-get update

Install Jupiter with following command:

$ sudo apt-get install jupiter

Usage

Launch Jupiter either from your Dash or Menu. It will be found on the Taskbar or Top menu. Click on the Jupitor icon in the Taskbar and Select Performance -> Power Saving.

Tooltip_020You’re done now! You don’t need to do any extra configuration and Jupiter gets the job done with default configuration.

3. Install ‘laptop-mode’ Tools To Reduce Overheating And Improve Battery Performance

Install ‘laptop-mode’ tools with command:

$ sudo apt-get install laptop-mode-tools

Reboot your system to enable laptop-mode. Run the following command to verify the laptop-mode is enabled or not.

$ cat /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode 
2

If you get output as 0(zero), laptop-mode is not yet enabled. Reboot couple of times until it gets enabled. Also make sure that you have removed all your existing previous installed applications like TLP and Jupiter.

Configure laptop-mode

Edit the file ‘/etc/default/acpi-support’,

$ sudo nano /etc/default/acpi-support

and add the following line if it does exist:

LAPTOP_MODE_ENABLED=true

Save and exit the file.

Once laptop-mode is enabled, open up the following file ‘/etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf’,

$ sudo nano /etc/laptop-mode/laptop-mode.conf

Find the line:

ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE_ON_AC=0

And change it to 1 as look like below.

ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE_ON_AC=1

And also make sure the value of ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE_ON_BATTERY is set to 1.

ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE_ON_BATTERY=1

Now restart laptop-mode to take effects the saved changes.

$ sudo /etc/init.d/laptop-mode restart

If still having problem with enabling laptop-mode, just do the following as root user:

$ sudo su
# echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode

Now run the command:

# cat /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode 
5

If you get the above result, you’re done! Now you will find that a little bit improvement in your battery life and less overheating in your laptop.

References:

Ask Ubuntu

Ubuntu Wiki