Most of the laptops come with high graphics card such as NVidia these days. These graphics cards are mostly used for gaming purposes. If you are not interested in gaming, these graphics card are just white elephants. If you are using Linux, lets say Ubuntu, you might not be using the graphics card at all. But do you know that despite f that you are still feeding that white elephant your laptop’s batter life? You might also be suffering from overheating of laptop as a side effect of the graphics card. Though there are several ways to improve your laptop’s battery life, in this case of NVidia (Optimus), you can save significant battery life by just turning the graphics card off.

The Bumblebee Project is a set of tools developed by people aiming to provide Optimus support under Linux (legacy nVidia hybrid graphics is supported too) while waiting for kernel and drivers to support these notebook.

How to Install Bumblebee on Ubuntu?

For Installation you need to download 90-100 MB in total. Open your terminal and enter these commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bumblebee/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia

Enter your password when it asks for it.

Restart your computer once the installation finishes. Bumblebee doesn’t have any visible icons, but in my laptop Graphics card light was turned off:

The battery life of my laptop increased drastically from 1:30 Hrs to 2:30-3 Hrs.

Do give it a try and see if it improves the battery life of your laptop as well. Feel free to comment if you have any questions, I will be happy to help you.

Author Bio: Sibin Xavier is the owner of tech-blog 7 Chip. He is a tech enthusiast and a Linux lover. You can catch him on his .