Increase your laptop's battery life under Vista! (yes, it is possible!!!)

Hi!

So, you have a new laptop with Vista pre-installed, you are quite happy, then you check
this little icon in the system tray that says "100% battery : 1 hour 48 minutes left"!
Quite disappointing!
Fortunately for you, there are a few ways to increase your battery life with third-party programs.

First, Vista Battery Saver : this is a nice little program that allows you to disable both Aero and the sidebar while in battery mode. What is more, you can even tell the program at what point you want to disable them: for instance, you can set Aero to be disabled when there is 70% battery left and the sidebar when there is 40% battery left. This is all very easy to do and quite intuitive.

My advice would be to remove Aero as soon as possible because it uses A LOT of power.
On my U1, disabling Aero would allow me to gain around 15 minutes out of the 2 hours of battery life of the 3-cell battery. I can't tell about the sideboard 'cos I automatically remove it when i install Vista: it uses too many ressources for my liking!
As a conclusion, I can say that it is a nice app, even though it uses 9 Mb of you RAM which is a bit high I think. It is still improving though; for instance it seems that it was not working with Vista Home Premium, but it has been fixed.

2. RmClock: this is an open source project that allows you to adjust your CPU performance on-the-fly and create different profiles depending on your utilisation. For instance, you can use "ondemand" so that your CPU switches between full power (100% CPU) when, say, you work on a picture with Photoshop, and 50% CPU power when you are browsing the web.
Also, quite importantly, you can undervolt the CPU: it means that you can decrease the voltage allocated to each setting of your CPU. For instance, let's say that at full power, your CPU uses 1.35V; with RMclock, you can decrease that amount to 1.2 V for instance. This cools the system down and reduces power consumption which, in turn, increases battery life. Of course, you have to be careful in your settings: you cannot set 0.95 V for the "full power" setting: in that case, your computer will certainly freeze. One drawback of Rmclock is that you can't test each setting whereas with

3. NHC you can! The thing is, you need to have Microsoft's .NET Framework Version 2.0 for NHC to work. I think it comes pre-installed with Vista however. NHC is a bit slower on boot than RMclock and it uses more resources but it might be a bit more user-friendly than RMclock, so it is up to you. With NHC, you might even be able to control the speed of your fan, but it depends on your laptop. On mine, it soes not work.

To conclude, I can say that using Vista Battery Saver and either RMclock or NHC, you can definitely reclaim quite a bit of battery life under Vista.

However, Vista is still slow as hell (in my opinion!), so that I prefer Linux. Moreover, Beryl is waaaaaaaaay better than Aero. Hence, in another message I will talk about Ubuntu Linux on my U1F.