hehe, you say not to research pm, but then suggest to research cold fusion. LOL
Perpetual motion is a noble search. With such power, no one would have to work, for we'd have enough energy to do all sortsa cool stuf. But it isn't going to happen. This very idea is what original brought me to this forum. I've learned and changed a lot since I first came here (so has this forum now that I think about it).
I was so convinced I had come up with PM, I had come up with a method I still haven't seen anyone trying to use. It functioned, it moved, it melted my battery cause I was trying to put energy back in it while pulling energy from it. And yes, I wasted a lot of time toying with it. But I learned some important things.
Picture the old school pm machines. The flywheels with the counter weights that slide back and forth, creating a downward force which would spin it back up again.
In a 0 gravity, frictionless environment such a thing would spin for quite sometime. Keep in mind the definition of perpetual motion: A machine which, once set in motion, will stay in motion until parts wear out or it is stopped.
In that regards, I'd say the universe could very well be considered perpetual motion. I don't know about the machine part, for that implies a creator, to many issues to touch there.
Anyhow, back to the ole school wheel. Let's say you get it spinning, say, 10,000 rpm. You put a pulley on it that turns a belt, which turns a generator. For each time the wheel turns, the generator turns twice. By turning a generator, and say, powering a house, you remove rotational energy from the wheel, convert it into electrical energy, and burn it in your television.
Eventually, the wheel will stop spinning, as each watt you draw from the energy exerts an opposite force on the wheel. Now, while it isn't perpetual, here is the trick. On the opposite side of the wheel which contains the generator puller, you setup an even larger puller, twice the size of the spinning wheel. This pulley is hooked up to an electric motor which is driven by a nucleur/thermoelectric generator.
The purpose of the wheel, instead of producing energy, becomes a sort of mechanical battery. In that it converts electrical energy into rotational energy, which can then later be extracted back out and put into use. Would you like to see something like this in action? Rip the engine out of your car. See the flywheel? Same concept. Check out a pottery wheels, they are peddle powered, spin up to speed, spin for a while, friction takes its toll and you must pump it again.
That is one of the major problems. We don't have a good electricity tank. We can't put 5 gallons of electrons in a plasitc tank and carry it out in the middle of the woods with us. It isn't so much that we don't have ways to generate electricity, but more so we don't have ways to stockpile it, and any excess energy that is produced is wasted. That, is where your time would best spent, trying to figure out how to store electricity better.