Linux Power Consumption

Intel has created powertop [www.linuxpowertop.org], a power consumption watch utilitiy that work very similar to `top` program but this is to watch processes that takes much of your laptop battery life.

In Debian unstable I could just apt-get install powertop to use it. It also has the ability to give many (useful?) suggestions how to save my power. After implement some of them, I get to save a few watts and extends my battery life.

What's also interesting to me, I've learn that accessing gmail from firefox seems to contribute a lot to my laptop power consumption. Heavy javascripts? Don't know, but this may results of me not standing by gmail all the time from now on.