Im using a brand new Dell XPS notebook (bought mar 2012) which has 4.5 hrs battery life using a 6 cell battery-when i use windows 7. The machine uses an Intel core 17 2670qm processor, and a 64 bit operating system.

I downloaded Ubuntu 11.10 and installed it on a USB drive, which is how i use it. I still have Windows 7 on the machine. When the machine is booting up I hit F12, and run Ubuntu from the flash drive instead of the machine booting Windows, as it normally would.

On the Ubuntu menu, on the top right area, there is a battery menu, which shows how long to charge battery, or how much life left etc..with a fully charged battery the most Ubuntu will give me is 1.5 hrs. I've adjusted all power setting etc by clicking on the battery meter where i can make these adjustments, and have even turned down the brightness on the monitor.

I've read through these questions here, and a user wrote to install Ubuntu 12(?)(the alpha version) when it's out this month(april), and this has better power management. Other forums (Ubuntu wiki) state that windows 7 controls power management effectively because it's configured to work with the hardware.

I'd like to install Ubuntu and wipe windows but can't because of this issue. I need my notebook to go hours, not an hour and a bit.

Can anybody recommend possibly a good software to use, that will work with the machines bios under Ubuntu? Another thought of mine, is- since I didn't yet wipe windows off my hard disk, is windows still possibly controlling the power mgmt aspect on the machine? I've thought of calling tech support at Dell and asking for help there, maybe Dell has something (a tweak?), I can download that'll work under Ubuntu.

Looking forward to any help/suggestions i can get here, i'm really stuck on this..