How to reduce the performance of an Ubuntu system (or optimize for power consumption)?

Question

linux

Hello.
In general, the situation is as follows:
I have a laptop, quite old, but enough for my tasks. It runs an Ubuntu 14 system. But it has such a tendency that it can suddenly turn off on its own and go to reboot. The half-life is about 2 hours.
When speakers are connected via BlueTooth, it turns off more often, and watching videos on youtube in 720p quality and higher also increases the risk; on Windows 7 it turned off only when working intensively with an external USB hard drive.
In general, I myself do not understand much about hardware, but I sin that it does not have enough power and cannot stand it. I'll try to look for other chargers, but still recommend what should be done to reduce power consumption? Some configs to twist or something.

Answer 1

You can try cpufrequtils . I have it on 15.04, it works without problems.
But you seem to have a problem with the memory in your computer. At least I had similar shutdowns, I changed the RAM and it stopped turning off. Run some kind of memtest, it would also be nice to make sure that the RAM is like the motherboard in terms of voltage, and you can also disassemble the computer, blow it off the dust and make sure that the RAM sits tightly in the socket, if not, then fix it. Such shutdowns can still happen from overheating of the processor, if the cooler does not work well, there is a lot of dust, etc.

Answer 2

There is little information, it can reboot from a high temperature on a processor or video card that is clogged with dust.

Answer 3

If it's a matter of temperature.
Install the lm-sensors package - look at the output of sensors in different modes, the critical temperatures in different nodes are indicated there, compare. You can reset the readings to the file once a minute by cron and then see what happened before the next reboot.
Perhaps hardware decoding is not enabled - and therefore the CPU gets very hot when watching a video. Then http://help.ubuntu.ru/wiki/hardware_support_hd...
If you want to reduce consumption
Install powertop Install
laptop-mode-tools if not.
Is your laptop turning off with the battery? In general, if you usually work with a battery, then it is unlikely that the matter is in the charger.
In general, the topic is extensive. If you want to dig in, you can start withwww.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_reduce_power_consumption