I run ubuntu 11.10 on a thinkpad and I find that battery life is on a par with Windows. You might want to investigate the ASPM power regression issue; pcie_asp

I run ubuntu 11.10 on a thinkpad and I find that battery life is on a par with Windows. You might want to investigate the ASPM power regression issue; pcie_aspm=force might work for you (or wait for ubuntu 12.04 which cw the 3.2 kernel containing the fix)