I was praising Ubuntu earlier for its great hardware support. One thing it didn’t have out of the box however (which is a very nice feature of modern hardware) was dynamic frequency scaling. There is a detailed description over at the Ubuntu Guide wiki which worked nicely (yes, you actually need to remove packages – the instructions are correct). You can also add a widget (just search for CPU in the widget list) which shows the current frequency. I would recommend the conservative power scheme which Sets the CPU depending on the current usage. It differs in behaviour in that it gracefully increases and decreases the CPU speed rather than jumping to max speed the moment there is any load on the CPU. This behaviour more suitable in a battery powered environment..