Freezing + Poor Battery Life on Ivy Bridge CPU + nVidia GPU

[transient]

I installed LMDE 201303 Cinnamon 64bit on a Sony S15 with a quad core Ivy Bridge 3632QM and an nVidia 640M LE. The original kernel was 3.2.0-4-amd64 3.2.32-1. Initially, everything seemed fine. As I began installing more applications I noticed the notebook would freeze quite frequently, particularly when running programs under wine. When freezing sometimes the keyboard would become unresponsive, the mouse would not be able to click anything, but it could be moved across the screen and background images (such as conky) would update. Other times the notebook would freeze completely. From what I understand it's a known issue with Ivy Bridge that requires a kernel above 3.2.39-1, but I can't find one in any of the repos and I'm not super confident compiling my own kernel.

I ended up installing 3.8-10.dmz.1-liquorix-amd64 3.8.0-6, which solved the freezing, but it is not compatible with bumblebee. This meant I had to disable the GPU in the bios, which is not ideal. Windows would get around 4.5 hrs of battery life. With Mint I'm getting just over 2 hrs. Even with the GPU disabled, doing light computing, power consumption (powertop) is around 17-22W, which seems way too high. Maybe I need to check it's not still draining power?

So any recommendations how to:
1. Get a kernel that will not freeze on Ivy Bridge that's compatible with bumblebee.
2. Reduce the idle power consumption.

Some hw specs:

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System:    Host: vaio Kernel: 3.8-10.dmz.1-liquorix-amd64 x86_64 (64 bit) Desktop: Cinnamon 1.8.2  Distro: Linux Mint LMDE
Machine:   System: Sony (portable) product: SVS1513C5E version: C60BV5MX
           Mobo: Sony model: VAIO Bios: Insyde version: R1020C8 date: 10/12/2012
CPU:       Quad core Intel Core i7-3632QM CPU (-HT-MCP-) cache: 6144 KB flags: (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx) 
           Clock Speeds: 1: 1200.00 MHz 2: 1200.00 MHz 3: 1200.00 MHz 4: 1200.00 MHz 5: 1200.00 MHz 6: 1200.00 MHz 7: 1200.00 MHz 8: 1200.00 MHz
Graphics:  Card: Intel 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller 
           X.Org: 1.12.4 drivers: intel (unloaded: fbdev,vesa) Resolution: 1920x1080@59.9hz 
           GLX Renderer: Mesa DRI Intel Ivybridge Mobile GLX Version: 3.0 Mesa 8.0.4
Audio:     Card: Intel 7 Series/C210 Series Family High Definition Audio Controller driver: snd_hda_intel 
           Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture ver: k3.8-10.dmz.1-liquorix-amd64
Network:   Card-1: Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6235 driver: iwlwifi 
           IF: wlan0 state: up mac: b4:b6:76:07:4d:7e
           Card-2: Realtek RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller driver: r8169 
           IF: eth1 state: down mac: f0:bf:97:de:0e:ba
Drives:    HDD Total Size: 1000.2GB (4.8% used) 1: id: /dev/sda model: Samsung_SSD_840 size: 250.1GB 
           2: id: /dev/sdb model: WDC_WD7500BPVT size: 750.2GB 
Partition: ID: / size: 40G used: 7.1G (19%) fs: ext4 ID: swap-1 size: 8.47GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap 
Sensors:   System Temperatures: cpu: 50.0C mobo: N/A 
           Fan Speeds (in rpm): cpu: N/A 
Info:      Processes: 236 Uptime: 59 min Memory: 1734.9/11880.6MB Client: Shell (bash) inxi: 1.8.45 

[zerozero]

you need at least kernel 41.2

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zerozero@home ~ $ uname -a
Linux home 3.2.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.2.41-2 x86_64 GNU/Linux

it's available in testing at this moment.
if you feel confident doing this it's not a big of a problem
add to your sources.list

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deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free

update (but don't upgrade/dist-upgrade: the gap between lmde and testing atm is huge)
open synaptic and look for linux-image-3.2.0-4-amd64 and linux-headers-3.2.0-4-amd64, mark them for update (and accept the dependencies updates that they bring)
then head-up to http://suwako.nomanga.net/ and install bumblebee

good luck

[transient]

Thank you for the prompt reply zerozero! I upgraded to the recommended kernel. Your process was fine, when I tried compiling one myself there were so many options I just wasn't sure about.

Does 17-22W power consumption under light computing sound reasonable? It seems awfully high to me. I'll checkout laptop-mode-tools, but it seemed to be quite related to spinning down the hdd, which isn't something I would want to do frequently. Any other suggestions?

[zerozero]

Does 17-22W power consumption under light computing sound reasonable? It seems awfully high to me. I'll checkout laptop-mode-tools, but it seemed to be quite related to spinning down the hdd, which isn't something I would want to do frequently. Any other suggestions?

i'm glad you solved the kernel issue
unfortunately i don't know how to help you with this issue.