The battery doesn't last as long as it states (4hours wifi), it's more like 2 hours most of the time, I think there is someting wrong or some hiden process is sunning that take the juice all the time even in standby mode...

I wonder if there is an application like task manager under windows, where you can tell what processes is running and how much cpu time and memory it's talking etc.

BTW, in xterm, if I ps, I see lots of duplicate entries (2 process id), such as /usr/sbin/hulda, /usr/bin/modest etc, all listed twice.

I wonder if there is a process list for a clean install...I believe the smaller the load is, the longer the battery will last.

yes, there are, like "top" using xterm, load-applet, etc...

OK, top seems great, what's load-applet? How do I use it?

Ok, I got it. It's an installable app, I will try that. Thanks.

My favorite status-bar monitoring applet is osso-statusbar-cpu; it's a little more featureful than load-applet, although it doesn't blend as well with the factory icons. It can show graphs of CPU and memory consumption history instead of just current levels.

As for monitoring processes, having multiple processes of the same binary is normal, and many of the processes you see are doing nothing; what's important is how many processes are actually running, and how much CPU time they use to do it. You can use top, as the Sand Lord suggested, but there's a sexier, more useful top available called htop.