Atom processor and Linux Distro speed

[awspersuasion]

I was just wondering how much battery life is affected throughout different Linux distributions. I know the Atom processor is designed to use as little energy as possible but how much is battery life affected by the amount of running processes?

I ask this because I had initially setup a nice little Arch Linux set on my S10-3 but I had troubles getting the wireless driver to work right (the broadcom-sta for the 4313). Anyways, the other day, I decided to switch to Ubuntu 10.10 and almost everything worked out of the box (other than having to edit grub a little bit). So now I'm wondering if it is a good idea to go back to Arch or if Ubuntu really drains that much more battery life (I do plan on changing the DE/WM). Aside from that, I was also wondering if anyone else was running Arch Linux and if their boot time was significantly faster than... say Ubuntu.