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Recently I bought a new cheap Toshiba laptop which came preinstalled with windows vista home premium.

Being a cheap laptop the battery isn't great and only lasts for about an hour if it is left to run as setup by the pre-installer.

With some tweaking, turning off obvious unnecessary programmes, etc. I was able to extend the battery lift to 1hour 30 minutes max.

I was quite happy with that as it's just enough for me to use the laptop for work on the commute in and out of the office with a second charge while at work.

I'd like to use Linux as a replacement for windows if I can, and sometimes it's useful for testing server applications  so decided to make the laptop dual boot vista and ubuntu using the following tutorial:
http://apcmag.com/5046/how_to_dual_boot_vista_with_linux_vista_installed_first

This worked great and I now have a full ubuntu install as well as my tweaked vista.

While installing ubuntu I started to think of all the unnecessary garbage windows runs and how this may impact on the battery life, so I decided to do a little test which had a fairly shocking result.

I had expected some battery performance gain simply due to the nature of Linux as an OS BUT a full ubuntu install gave me 2 hours 40 minutes of battery life, compared to vista's initial hour.

Fantastic for me - on daily journey's I'll continue to use vista as it's more in tune with the office but for longer journeys I'll be using ubuntu!

 This start to make me think though...

Vista uses up the battery roughly twice as fast as Linux meaning that roughly it uses twice the power just to run.

Which means that any computer using vista and probably other versions of windows may be using at least twice as much power as they need to.

If this is the case and large organisations want to cut their energy expenditure they could potentially halve their bill for running PC's at least by switching to a Linux alternative.

Also half the energy used means half the carbon footprint of the running pc's which is better for the planet all round.

Nowadays desktop Linux is as usable as windows if not more so and as such I'd implore anybody who can to make the switch over as soon as they can.

Not only that, but there are Linux distributions out there styled to act like windows and therefore the switch would be even less painless.

And lastly, due to Linux being free, the exorbitant license fees paid to Microsoft simply disappear.

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Everybody out there at the moment is trying to make money from their blog in one way or another, and one great way I found recently was via matched.co.uk, who will pay you up to £75 per month just for putting their ads on your sites.

This is great, but the way they do it is by allocating you one ad per page, up to 5 pages per site which can be a problem for wordpress users:

1. Because the wordpress editor interferes with the ad code if it's pasted into a post
2. Because if you were to dump all the ads in to your sidebar so they appear on all pages they'd look a mess

To get around this, I have written a neat little ad rotator plugin / sidebar widget for matched ads which will display each ad correctly in the sidebar of each page you have an ad allocated to.

You can see this in action by visiting the following links:
http://www.coderchris.com/
http://www.coderchris.com/2007/09/21/making-flash-sites-easy/
http://www.coderchris.com/2007/09/19/installing-red5-open-source-flash-media-server-on-centos-42/

A screen shot of the interface is here:
http://www.christopher-dean.co.uk/images/main.php?g2_itemId=1980

If you too would like to make money from matched.co.uk easily with wordpress, then you can buy my ad rotator via paypal for just £10 by clicking this button:

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