the disgruntled Linux surgeon

Since I got a laptop I have been trying to optimize things so as to get the most out of it.

to get extra battery time, dim the screen backlight, use ondemand cpu governor, use laptop mode to spin down the hard disk and fans, and turn off the wifi and bluetooth when not using them.

Optimize your startup time so as to spend least possible time in high cpu mode and harddisk access. If you have enough ram use readahead.

Some experimental things to try are multithreaded PCI and USB detection, adaptive filesystem readahead ( in recent kernels ). Soon there will be dynticks support in the kernel.

Initng is a very effecient at optimizing startup time if you can figure out how to configure it.

Some people use a patch to undervolt the processor but i didn't try it.