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Vista Battery Saver: Get More Life Out Of Your Batteries

By Scott Gilbertson July 26, 2007 Categories: Operating Systems, Software & Tools

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There are no two ways about it, Windows Vista is a drain on laptop batteries. The two greatest energy hogs are the slick Aero interface and the gadget sidebar. It makes sense then, when running on battery power, to disable both of those features. Unfortunately there???s no easy way to do so with the default install, but the freeware app, Vista Battery Saver, makes the process a snap.

The newly released beta version adds the ability to switch between power management settings whenever you unplug.

Install Vista Battery Saver and every time you unplug your machine it will automatically switch off both the Aero interface and the sidebar. Plug in again and they???re back.

Once you install and setup Vista Battery Saver you don???t have to worry about it again, the software runs in the system tray and does its thing in the background.

Vista Battery Saver uses about 6 MBs of RAM, but has almost no effect on your CPU usage.

We???ve complained about Vista battery life in the past, and even Microsoft admits that the Aero interface reduces battery life by 1-4 percent (and I???d say that???s a very conservative estimate), but thanks to Vista Battery Life you should be able to milk even more precious minutes out of your laptop batteries.

I should note that Vista Battery Saver 2 is in beta and usual warnings apply, but I haven???t had any problems.

[via Download Squad]

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Tags: Vista
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