Quoting from another thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4847971 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4847971 <quote> If you are planning to run linux

Quoting from another thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4847971 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4847971 <quote> If you are planning to run linux, seriously re-consider buying laptops with hybrid graphics. The graphic card might or might not run, the card switching will most likely not work, but you can ignore it since you can work with the intel card, right? Well, no. Most of the AGP, whether used or not, will eat up power, the fan will run at full speed and your laptop's behind will be hot enough to stir fry some veggies. If you have a laptop with hybrid graphics, and you can't make it work, just switch off your discrete card. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HybridGraphics https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HybridGraphics Laptops in general, and linux laptops tend to run hot. However, don't mess with power settings a lot. Putting harddisks on powersaving mode(refer hdparm) so that they become idle puts unnecessary strain on the disk. You can try out experimenting with cpu frequency(cpufreq-set). </quote> If you want your "discrete card off" to persist through restarts, you will have to add this to your rc.local modprobe radeon # Assuming ati card echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch For suspend/resume, you will have to add a new file /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/00radeon-switch #!/bin/sh case "$1" in hibernate|suspend) echo ON > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch ;; thaw|resume) echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch ;; *) ;; esac exit 0 I have discovered putting the cpu policy to ondemand causes problems with pulseaudio(your volume icon will always be on mute and ps will show a pulseaudio process in D). I stopped fiddling with cpufreq, set it to performance, uninstalled cpufreq and was good to go. And as I commented earlier, I will strongly advice against putting the hard disk in power saving mode.