Ahh, yes. Thanks for asking. It occurred to me I probably should have included this info in my original post only after the window for editing it had passed. I

Ahh, yes. Thanks for asking. It occurred to me I probably should have included this info in my original post only after the window for editing it had passed. I'd previously written a bit about how to optimize the Thinkpad power consumption on another HN post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3564400 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3564400 FYI, I find that the kernel flags are necessary even with the latest kernel. I'm currently on 3.3.8-1-ARCH and experimented with turning them off because the power regression that started in kernels > 2.6 was supposed to have been fixed and merged back into the kernel code. But I found that passing the pcie_aspm=force flag at boot time still results in a significant savings. Indicating that the regression (for at least my configuration) might still be there. If you have an Intel video card, then check out the other kernel args I'm passing as well for additional power savings (and there are more parameters you can play with outlined here http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_i915_power&num=1 http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel...) I experimented with a few different combinations before settling on the ones I posted in my HN link, but they're what gives me optimal battery life on my T420. Despite what the other poster had said, I'm getting battery life now that's significantly better than what I get booting into Windows on the same machine, which usually stays at around 9-10 watts idle. I'm getting 6.8-7.8W Without any optimization, my battery life was much less than I'd expected to get from the 9-cell (~7 hours). But with the power management script and the kernel flags, I can get 13 hours with light use and 10-11 while doing development (i.e. apache, mysqld, eclipse, multiple browsers, etc... all running). edit: FYI powertop2 was the beta release of powertop at the time. the source has been merged back into powertop so you can just use that.