I am using a Dell laptop (4 GB RAM, core i5 processor @ 2.67 GHz). I have a dual boot with Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04.
However I observe that there is significantly more heating when I use Ubuntu as compared to Windows. Consequently, battery life is much lower as well.
Is it just because of the difference in OS or is there some way to change the cpu frequency settings in Ubuntu to fix such a problem ?
The PowerTOP program can help you determine where your battery life is going. It measures CPU wakeups, which drag the CPU out of low-power states, and assigns fault for the wakeup to specific programs. It's an amazing tool for software authors to improve their programs and for system administrators to find out why their data centers are so hot, or for individual users to find out how to improve their battery life.
I've been running it while writing this answer, and the top few lines of output look like this:
PowerTOP version 1.13 (C) 2007 Intel Corporation
Cn Avg residency P-states (frequencies)
C0 (cpu running) ( 6.1%) 2.80 Ghz 11.3%
polling 5.5ms ( 0.0%) 2.67 Ghz 0.4%
C1 mwait 0.2ms ( 0.1%) 2.00 Ghz 0.3%
C2 mwait 0.9ms ( 2.5%) 1.73 Ghz 0.4%
C3 mwait 4.2ms (91.2%) 1.60 Ghz 86.5%
Wakeups-from-idle per second : 246.3 interval: 15.0s
no ACPI power usage estimate available
Top causes for wakeups:
39.3% (290.2) [extra timer interrupt]
19.4% (143.3) npviewer.bin
7.1% ( 52.7)D firefox
8.0% ( 58.9) kworker/0:1
6.4% ( 46.9) [hda_intel] <interrupt>
4.6% ( 33.8) [kernel scheduler] Load balancing tick
4.1% ( 30.6) Xorg
2.3% ( 17.3) [radeon] <interrupt>
2.3% ( 16.7) USB device 1-5.2.2 : Apple Keyboard (Apple, Inc)
2.2% ( 16.5) [ehci_hcd:usb1, uhci_hcd:usb5, uhci_hcd:usb8, pata_jmicron, firewire_ohci] <interr
This is telling me that firefox and plugins account for 27% of my CPU wakeups; not a surprise, I'm streaming Pandora, and all they've got is some horrid Flash interface that eats a few watts for breakfast every morning.
Once you find what is eating your power, start looking for polling operations that can be converted into event-based operations. The Linux distributions have done a fair amount of work finding horrible polling interfaces and replacing them with event-based interfaces, but perhaps you're running something that hasn't yet been converted.
You should not be experiencing this problem with Ubuntu. I use Ubuntu 10.04 on my laptop and experience the opposite. I have longer battery life with Ubuntu, and most of the users I've read about and talked to have a better experience with Ubuntu. Open your System Monitor and go to the process tab, sort by % CPU and see if anything is taking up a lot of processing power. If it is, that is probably your culprit and you'll want to kill it and remove it from the startup if applicable.
CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor
This should solve the overheating problem.
http://itsfoss.com/solve-overheating-issue-in-ubuntu-12-10/
It worked for me. I am using Dell N5010 laptop(i5 processor and 4GB RAM,1GB ATI graphics card) ubuntu 10.04 and 12.04.
