I see my original request for help hasn't posted yet because it was 45k and message length seems to be 40k. (I put in a bunch of diagnostic info).
So here's the deal. I suffered some corruption with ecryptfs and lost a bit of my more important apps (things which don't install themselves but just launch out of home). After that I realized I had basically horked my install due to adding some bad repos. So I decided to try a clean install of the latest version of ubuntu. Everything went well except after rebooting and performing updates etc, the computer sounded like a jet engine. It was fully available and snappy but running full throttle constantly. I tried a bunch of different little tweaks, but nothing I did seemed to help. The system was fully available and running like a champ, but it was just running too loud and too hot. In desperation I posted a requested to the list for help, then got a bounce message because the message was evidently too big. Evidently I gave too much information with lsmod, lspci and ps ax. So I gave up for a bit and went about my day. I eventually came back to the problem a few hours later and started looking for distros that were linux optimized. I found one, but it's evidently no longer being created called fuduntu. Still I evaluated what it did different and noticed it had an app called "jupiter" that was supposed to help with battery life. Jupiter is no longer being maintained, but I found a replacement called TLP. I installed tlp and now my laptop is dead silent except when it needs to kick up for extra horsepower like a compile. Let me just say I am very, very happy with tlp. Whatever it's doing it solved my problem, my system is no longer running full throttle. So just a tip, if you install a new distro on a laptop consider putting tlp on it as soon as you're finished with the install. It helps ALOT. I've now had 4 hours of happily running unplugged doing what I normally do. If the battery meter isn't lying to me I still have 2 more hours at the current pace before I need to plug back in aain. With my previous distro (Linux mint) I was lucky to get 3. With windows 8 (which is what this thing shipped with) I was getting 2.5 - 3 regularly and could do 4 only if I was on power saver and shut down wifi. Thanks everyone for your eternal unending patience with me, and I hope this helps someone else in the future. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
