It's not a secret, that cool WDM (Aero user interface), announced in Windows Vista eat laptops' battery as hungry animal eats it's victim. But what, actually, "eat" your battery - mostly three things: Aero, Sidebar and your wide laptop screen. We have nothing to do with screen, but we can disable either Aero UI and Sidebar, while working on battery. Let me introduce Vista Battery Saver
This tinny program will save up to 70% of your battery by disabling those nice, but greedy Vista features. Running in task bar with private workset of 5.5M and 0% CPU it will do all work for you, by enabling and disabling customizable features when power source changed or battery power fall under certain percent.
Actually, I was inspired by similar program of Clint Rutkas and Code4Fun post (as usual, I love those guys) :). But Clint's soft was rather buggy and completely incompatible with Windows Vista Guidelines. This one is completely "Developed for Vista" - ACT 5.0 passed stuff (at least, I think so).
This is not final version, so use it for your own risk and, please, make me know about bugs or "behaviors", that make you sad :)
Download (beta 1) for free (MSI 806KB). You need Windows Vista Home Premium and notebook to run this program.
2 comments:
Eek! I just installed Vista Battery Saver on my Vista Business lappy, but can't work out how to activate it! There doesn't appear to be anything in the Start menu anywhere...
One thing it doesnt do which is a little annoying is recognise its state after the computer returns from hibernation. i.e. if computer hibernates because the battery went flat, after I plug the power in and switch computer on, the areo and sidebar do not re-appear.
Still, this program solves a problem that Vista created. Great Work :)
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