Hi,
I am a university student and often have to be writing essays while im low on battery. I use ubuntu for normal usage, i like it but it is not the best for this purpose.

I need suggestions on what to do. I am planning to install another linux distro just for word processing. I require only the following things:
-Fast boot - I dont really need many of the deamons that start
-Stability - I dont want to loose my essay which is due a few minutes later
-Good power management - I want maximum use of my battery while i have a lot of work. turn off wifi when not in use & such.
-Simple window manager that does not take a lot of battery.
-Something that supports suspend & Tha far none of the distros tested on my dv6000 laptop had this working. I tried ubuntu, debian & fedora.
-Good tool for connecting to wifi networks
-Possibility of running word 2007 would be a bonus, possibly on virtualbox

Thanks

I would just install fluxbox, dillo as browser. And there should be tons of lightweight text editors. Of course you can just use DSL or puppy, but I guess it would be a plus if you don't need to set up dual-boot just for that. And I don't know if those two have reasonable power management.

It was all computing until that last line. Word 2007? Just about every word processor or writing tool on the planet is less bloated and resource hungry than Word. Not only that, but now you're dragging in Windows APIs so that you can run Word.

3 suggestions in the order I would consider them in.

1. Get that power. Get a second battery or find a way to recharge. But okay, maybe this isn't going to happen.

2. Use a light weight distribution. But how much real power saving will you see? And what are your word processing needs? How much extra time are you hoping for? 5 minutes? 2 hours?

3. Learn to use a text formatting utility in console mode, but again how much time would this save on your battery and take to learn.

Suggestion 1 takes money or location, 2 and 3 take your time.

Well, I do want to dual boot for this you see. When I have to work with power unplugged, I dont want to wait 2-3 minutes before my system is ready to use. More like less than a minute. I dont want fancy 3D desktop to uselessly waste my battery. I dont want useless daemons to be working in the background, absolutely what is essential. I like the fluxbox and dillo idea. Perhaps I could use Abiword for word processing, a simple text editor is not something i would want and Open office is too resource hungry. The reason why I want word 2007 is because many people send me documents in word 2007 format, although abiword handles previous versions of word documents correctly, it does not support word 2007. So maybe some kind of a word 2007 converter would be good. I am hoping to have 30-45 mins extra.