30.1.1 Power Conservation
The inclusion of energy-optimized system components during laptop manufacturing
contributes to their suitability for use without access to the electrical power grid. Their
contribution towards conservation of power is at least as important as that of the oper-
ating system. openSUSE® supports various methods that inuence the power consump-
tion of a laptop and have varying effects on the operating time under battery power.
The following list is in descending order of contribution towards power conservation:
• Throttling the CPU speed.
• Switching off the display illumination during pauses.
• Manually adjusting the display illumination.
• Disconnecting unused, hotplug-enabled accessories (USB CD-ROM, external
mouse, unused PCMCIA cards, WLAN, etc.).
• Spinning down the hard disk when idling.
Detailed background information about power management in openSUSE is provided
in Chapter 31, Power Management (page 503). For more information desktop specic
power management, see the Section “Controlling Your Desktop’s Power Management”
(Chapter 2, Working with Your Desktop, ↑GNOME User Guide) on how to use the
GNOME Power Manager. More information about the KDE power management applet
is available at Chapter 9, Controlling Your Desktop’s Power Management (↑KDE User
Guide).
494 Reference