First of all. I don't bother under or over clocking a system through the BIOS. This is possible and can yield desired results, however, it is much more unstable.

I use Linux, therefor, I have a nice tool already available to me. It's call cpufreq-selector. It is a command-line tool for choosing CPU frequency settings.

In order to find out if your system supports using this tool is to execute this command.
"cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies"

If you see a list of numbers, your systems supports setting the frequency at any of these speeds.

I've been bragging recently about how many obstacles I've overcome with Linux as a whole. There's many things I've been doing to Ubuntu to make it extremely fast and flexible for my uses. I also happen to be one of those people that forgets absolutely everything.

I very frequently decide I'm going to do something later that isn't something big and forget about it, or forget about a homework assignment. I've tried using those note taking and memo apps. I found that tomboy was pretty good. Unfortunately, not good enough.

I've been trying to get maximum battery life out of my computer. Right now I only get about 3 hours under light use plus IRC and Pidgin.

Honestly, one of the best ways to save battery power is just to use different programs that do the same thing. I switched to using OpenBox.

I previously made a post about the desktop environment taking a lot of power. Linux Power Saving This change has saved me a LOT of battery life.

I'm going to have a couple articles on the subject in the future but this article is going to address one of the biggest causes of poor battery performance.

Everything you do causes your battery to drain. Yes, even pressing the spacebar takes power. I know, it sucks.

I have a beautiful setup with Gnome. I don't think I could ask for anything else. A nice mac theme, a pretty desktop, compiz working fully with a nice pretty cube, my girlfriend on the top of the cube, an appealing set of screenlets that i can see by pressing F9.

This is just going to be a quick mention.

I don't have any hard numbers, nor can I find much on Google to suport my claims.

When I switched from Ext3 to ReiserFS, I nearly doubled my overall battery life.

Hopefully somebody can find some references to give me something a little more solid.

What an interesting question... Why not use all the RAM and HD space you have as long as it doesn't affect performance? It's one that's been nagging at me a lot lately.

I've seen an 8.10 64bit Live CD running on a dual monitor setup and I've seen it do so VERY beautifully. Everything except sound worked right out of the box. If I had a desktop system like that, I'd be running it that same way. It was fast, responsive, pretty, everything.