Comment 89 for bug 760131

*Grar*. The "conservative" regulator only saves power on really ancient hardware. On current hardware it *loses* you battery life.

C.f. this post by Matthew Garret who hacks kernels for Redhat and is generally to credit for a lot of laptop-specific testing, work on platform-specific ACPI drivers, etc.

<http://mjg59.livejournal.com/88608.html?thread=1059616>

You should also be able to find a similar explanation somwhere from Arjan, who worked (works?) for *intel*.

If I remember correctly, current kernels will even select "conservative" automatically on the ancient CPUs where it is appropriate.

Believe it or not, Linux distributions aren't _quite_ so incompetent as to leave massive battery life/heat wins on the table for years, by not bothering to simply set an existing configuration option when running on a laptop.

While I'm ranting, I'd like to point out this bug is about a regression - something that got _worse_ on Linux, that in the worst case can be tracked down by looking through older versions. ("bisection"). It won't help us to compare Windows - and try and reverse-engineer what it's doing better - when we know that there's a version of _Linux_ that's doing better. You'll only be able to isolate a windows-linux difference if you know you're _not_ suffering from this regression, _and_ you're running a recent kernel (otherwise you may be overlooking more recent power improvements. Runtime-PM works very nicely on my EEEPC, although it's not enabled by default at the moment). It's worth mentioning in a general discussion, but it's not going to help fix bug #760131.