Skype is eating my battery

I have just started using Skype on my laptop and so I installed the default version, 1.4.0.118. Then I had a play with the intel powertop tool and it was saying that Sype was waking my processor from it's sleep state 200 times a second which is not good for battery life. A quick search and I find that this is a known problem.

Luckily there are beta 2.0 versions Skype now available and this pretty much cures this. As a bonus it also has video support.