Comment 93 for bug 760131

"*Grar*. The "conservative" regulator only saves power on really ancient hardware. On current hardware it *loses* you battery life."

Good to know, Mr. Jenkins. I suppose this information ought to be widely proliferated, as many Linux kernel manuals (as Google readily shows), published as recently as this year, still say that Conservative is better for all battery devices, and makes no distinction between old and new hardware. At any rate, it was just an experiment, since I'd guess the main issue for most is the excessive heat. At least, most people I've talked to with this problem thought that was the most immediately noticeable change on their laptops, and discovered the decreased battery life and found out about the increased power consumption regression later.

"Believe it or not, Linux distributions aren't _quite_ so incompetent as to leave massive battery life/heat wins on the table for years, by not bothering to simply set an existing configuration option when running on a laptop."

As far I understand what's been going on here, people are just trying to discover short-term treatments, not a cure, so to speak, while they patiently wait for a true fix from the Kernel Team.