Reducing Chrome Power Usage in Linux
I'm running ubuntu maverick on my ASUS U35F. It's got a couple problems (LCD screen viewing angle is right out of the 1990s, no nvidia graphics because they only offer the jury-rigged and linux-incompatible "Optimus", no CDROM drive -- I used to care about this; somebody remind me why) but it's fast & quiet, has plenty of RAM and hard drive space, and it has phenomenal battery life. Like you can use it during the whole flight ... to Korea.
That is, it will last the whole flight if you're careful. What's the best way to manage power usage in linux? Powertop. What causes the most problems for a web browser tab-addict like myself? Unsurprisingly, Adobe's flash player ("npviewer.bin") and the resource-hungry applets people create therein. So how do I track down the obscure pages where flash is doing nothing but wasting battery? (the AWS login page, anyone?!?) Press shift-escape to open chrome's awesome task manager, then scroll down to "Shockwave Flash" and click "End Process". Any tabs running flash get a little message bar at the top and battery usage falls to a tree-hugging 8-watts-or-so.
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