Screen brightness is an attribute that is reset automatically upon rebooting your machine on Ubuntu and all its fellow distributions. Lucky you if you find the settings okay, but on notebooks and similar machines, you might want to lower the
Troubleshoot and Improve power usage on Windows 7
Windows 7 has a troubleshooter taking care of power usage for notebooks as well as for desktop computers, it is quite hard to find however since you won't find it in your Control Panel's Power Options section. To access it,
Show battery capacity for notebooks on Windows
Notebook batteries lose part of their capacity over time depending on their treatment. To see at how much maximum capacity your battery it, there is a command line tool that you can use from an elevated command line. To open
Change to classic skin when unplugging notebook from power source in Windows
Windows 7 comes with the Aero skin by default which might look nice but consumes a great deal of resources - and with them, power. I have experienced a loss of up to two hours of battery life on my