Save up to 70% of your laptop’s battery in Vista

July 27, 2007 |

Save up to 70% of your laptop’s battery in Vista

By Jonathan Schlaffer

Save up to 70% of your laptop's battery in Vista Ever since it came out, Vista has been reviewed over and over again by almost every site and the one thing that is common for laptops is reduced battery life when compared to laptops running XP. Vista’s Aero glass interface along with several other features eat up battery life. A new tool has been released to help cope with this problem.

Before I go on, in all fairness, Vista has most of these power saving features built-in but for some users they may be hard(er) to access, it’s fairly straight forward if you ask me, just go to the Control Panel, go to Power Options and change the power mode to “Power Saver” but it never hurts to have an application handy that purports to increase your battery life by 70%.

Your mileage will vary, depending on the hardware you are running. For example, a laptop with a dedicated video card will use more power than one that only has an integrated graphics card. It also depends on screen size, battery type (6-cell or 9-cell), hard drive use, optical drive use and a whole host of other things such as exactly what you are doing on the laptop while on battery power.

I could list all the things that affect battery life but that would take quite a bit of space. I doubt very much Vista battery saver will increase battery life by 70% but there is no doubt in my mind that it will help some. It’s affect on desktop replacement style laptops will be marginal, at best since these use a lot of power regardless of what mode you are operating in.

According to the site, the largest power users in Vista are Aero Glass and the Sidebar, after that there is hardware not in use which can easily be disabled in the Device Manager this could include Bluetooth devices, modems and optical drives. WiFi cards are on the list but, in my opinion, a laptop is pretty useless without wireless enabled. Using the sidebar is down to user preference, I found it useless, in fact it’s one of the very first things I turned off.

I can find no reason not to try Vista battery saver but by the same token, I can’t see it saving 70% of my battery life. In order to try Vista battery saver you will need a laptop running Vista Home Premium and better (sorry, no versions of Basic are supported, on second thought, I’m not sorry, why are you using Basic?)