Upthrust

The management of energy consumption in laptops and other mobile devices is increasingly important in order to extend the battery lifetime or to increase the number of applications that can use the system’s resources. It is also used in quiet computing settings and to decrease energy and cooling costs for lightly loaded machines.

Even though this technology has many advantages when using laptop with battery power, it makes me annoying sometimes when I work using AC power.In some situation it makes my laptop very slow when I run several applications like Firefox, IntelliJ IDEA and Adobe Acrobat simultaneously. I have to always switch frequency scaling to performance to get required level of responsiveness and sometimes my Ubuntu 9.04 failed to scale the frequency when I want it to do it. Because I have AC power most of the times I decided to switch to performance mode permanently.

As I found out, sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets method does not work anymore and instead I have to install rcconf and configure CPU throttling using rcconf.

First we need to install rcconf using sudo apt-get install rcconf command and then run it with administrative privileges using sudo rcconf . You will following configuration view on you terminal. Then search for ‘ondemand‘ option and disable(un-check the check-box) it using space-bar. To save the configuration hit the tab key so that “OK” is highlighted then enter to save and reboot.

Now from the add CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor applet to your Gnome panel and select ‘Performance’ option by clicking applet.

How to revert the change

Open the rcconf application again with administrative privileges and scroll to bottom. There will be un-checked ‘ondemand’ option, check it using space-bar and save. The change will be available from the next restart.