Battery life under Linux has always been worse that Windows in every machine I have ever owned. So I set out to find out what I could do on my new Samsung Princeton to stretch the battery as far as possible while still leaving me a machine I could use for programming. This blog is part one or a two part blog series on what I found and the optimizations I made. My laptop now gets over 8 hours of battery life which is significantly better than the 4-5 hours I was previously getting.

Ubuntu 11.10 has been installed on my Samsung Chronos 7 since the day I bought it.  After finally figuring out how to get the hybrid graphics to behave, I turned my attention towards getting the touchpad to work correctly.  Under the stock kernel the touchpad, which is reported as an Elantech v4, does not show in Gnome3 as a touchpad and is fairly unusable.  There is no multi-finger support and I would constantly hit the mouse while I was typing.  I would basically disable the internal mouse any time I was in Linux and just use an external mouse.  This is fine when I am at my desk, but...

I recently purchased an Intel 320 series 120GB SSD hard drive for my Samsung Princeton ultrabook.  The drive was intended to replace my Corsair Force3 SSD that I could never get to work with the laptop.  The Force3 was too large for the laptop and always caused issues with the wireless as soon as the drive was installed.  I tried multiple things to get it to work including taking it apart to make it smaller and making custom carriers for the SSD.  It didn’t seem to matter what I did, the second I installed the Force3 I would immediately get wireless issue.  It would take ages for my laptop...