Hi, I recently switched from Win 7 pro to Linux Mint Mate 17.3. 

Computer is an HP laptop probook 455 G1 with an AMD A8 and 16 Gb ram.  In the same transition, I switched from a normal HD to a Patriot Ignite SSD, which really sped things up, especially boot time.  It is not the fastest SSD on the market, but the price is reasonable and it is faster than the SATA 2 connection in the laptop.

Since the performance is so good now for my everyday tasks, I am thinking about changing the settings to reduce processor performance and extend battery life.  In win 7 pro, this was a quick setting click.  In Linux Mint, the power settings mostly have to do with screen timeouts and brightness, but I am having trouble finding anything related to reducing power settings on the processor.


Suggestions?

Thanks
 

SSDs are getting faster than SATA can deal with anyway (and googling suggests that your laptop has SATA II, your drive's probably quicker than it can handle). So yeah, getting a slower (relatively) one is smart since you get the same effective performance for less money (unless you're using M.2. or PCIE or something).

Easiest way to scale your CPU back in Mint is to use this.

If you want to get your hands dirtier, then have a read of this.

To dick around with power saving stuff in general in a finegrained way you want a package called laptop mode tools. There's *lots* of stuff to configure (if you want to, like). Good documentation here (it's for Arch but it'll work the same in Mint).

Thanks for those links.

You are exactly correct about the laptop, its SATA 2, so any SSD is faster than it needs.

I am really happy with Mint so far.  I switched to using libreoffice a few years ago on win 7, and that made the final transition to Mint very easy.

Next task - business card scanning and software with functionality similar to CardScan.  With 6 K business card scans, I can't just leave that behind, and really still need business card scanning capability.  That one is actually still on my xp box.  I guess in theory, I could try to run it under wine.

The access time as well transfer speed helps with SSDs.

And wine always helps (hic)

Run it on Windows 95 in a browser :'D

https://win95.ajf.me/

Amazing.