Laptops

This section contains information for people using Ubuntu on a laptop computer.

Power management settings

You may wish to change the power management settings of your laptop in order to help extend its battery life and reduce energy wastage.

  1. Press SystemPreferencesPower Management.

  2. Change the settings as appropriate. Changes are applied instantly.

Displaying a screensaver may use more power than simply letting the screen go blank. Turning off the screensaver could slightly improve the battery life of your laptop.

  1. Press SystemPreferencesScreensaver.

  2. Change the Screensaver theme to Blank screen. This will simply display a blank screen as a screensaver.

[Note]

When your laptop is running on battery, one of the biggest drains on power is the display. Turning the brightness of the display down could improve battery life significantly; many laptops allow you to do this by pressing Fn+F7 several times.

Touchpads

Most laptop computers come with a touchpad, which is used to control the mouse pointer. There are many ways of changing the way that the touchpad behaves; the most basic touchpad settings can be configured in the following way.

  1. Press SystemPreferencesMouse.

  2. Select the Touchpad tab.

  3. Here you can change the touchpad settings to your liking. Changes should take effect immediately.

Some touchpads may be detected as normal mouse devices, even though they are actually touchpads. In this case, the Touchpad tab will not be available in the mouse preferences.

[Note]

See the community support pages for more information on touchpads.

Finding laptop testing reports

Many laptops are regularly tested by the Ubuntu community to ensure that various features work correctly. The results of these tests are available for you to read, and may offer insight into any problems you might be experiencing with your laptop.

You can participate in laptop testing yourself by contacting the Laptop Testing Team.