A sure way to get more out of your laptop battery per charge is to conserve power.  Computer programs can make your computer use power.  But how do you figure out which programs running on your machine are the culprits in using more power than they need ? This is where PowerTop a command line tool comes to the rescue.

Powertop is a program that shows the power consumption on Intel based laptops and makes suggestions on how to extend battery lifetime.  You can install binary versions of powertop in most main stream Linux distributions by using their respective package installers. Powertop is the brain child of Arjan Van De Ven.

PowerTOP combines various sources of information from the kernel into one convenient screen so that you can see how well your system is doing at saving power, and which components are the biggest problems.

Accordingly, powertop provides hints on how to rectify the misbehaving applications and thus conserve power of your Intel laptop.

Goals of Powertop

Powertop has 4 basic goals, them being :

  1. Show how well your system is using the various hardware power-saving features.
  2. Identify software components that are preventing optimal usage of your hardware power saving.
  3. Help Linux developers to tune their applications to achieve optimal power utilization behaviour.
  4. Provide you tips on how to rectify the existing anomaly of misuse of power by your culprit applications.

Check out the following screenshot to get an idea of the features of this remarkable tool which will come in handy for Intel based laptop users  in achieving optimal power consumption.

Powertop interface

You can learn more about powertop at its official site.

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