Battery life is obviously a core reason for optimizing operating systems in this regard. Another factor is the cost of energy. Users and organizations save money running energy efficient systems, especially in times where energy costs reach new heights every year.

Microsoft reveals details about their testing procedure in the blog post. More interesting from a user perspective are software based changes that have an impact on a computer’s energy consumption. One example is provided.

If you have played around with the developer preview of Windows 8, you may have noticed that Metro UI applications get suspended instead of killed when you open the Task Manager. In fact, there was not even a way to kill Metro UI applications right away in the Metro user interface. Microsoft calls this method Background Tasks which gives applications the ability to “run app code even when the app is suspended”.

Suspending apps is beneficial to a system’s power consumption in cases where users would not close them otherwise.

Related to this are improvements in application idle durations on Windows 8. The idle state is essential from a power saving point of view. A longer idle period duration is beneficial to a system’s overall power consumption. Microsoft has managed to increase the idle period duration significantly under Windows 8. Take a look at the following chart.

It is interesting to note that Microsoft is not providing a direct comparison of power consumption under Windows 7 and Windows 8. While this may have something to do with the fact that the operating system is still in development, that’s what users want to see. Will Windows 8 be more power efficient than Windows 7? Will battery life last longer on the same hardware? It will be interesting to see how the beta fares in term of power consumption.

Depending on your laptop’s model you can get anything from 1-hour usage to 12 hours, but there are things you can do to extend this even more by altering the settings on your laptop to make it more efficient.

To get started, find the battery icon on your Windows 7 laptop, it will be on the bottom taskbar near where the time is displayed. Click on this once as you would to check how much battery you have left. You’ll see a link called “more power options”, and you’ll open a control panel screen called power options, where you can change all sorts of settings. You’ll probably have been on this screen before to adjust how long your screen stays on when you leave it alone. This is basic power saving, but in this tutorial we’re going to be looking at more advanced options.

What you need to do is choose one of the existing power plans, and click on the link next to it that says “change plan settings”. This will take you to yet another screen where you can adjust sleep and display settings. Underneath all of this you’ll see another link called “change advance power settings”. Click on this to move onto the next step.

In the advanced power options you’ll find many different settings including video power settings, to hard disk settings, USB power settings, wireless adapter settings etc. You’ll find you can adjust all of these separately whether you’re running on power, or on battery, and this will enable you to fine tune your laptop for the tasks and environment you typically use it for.

To give an example, if you take your laptop to an office each day and plug it into the corporate network with a CAT5 cable, the chances are you don’t use Wi-Fi a great deal. If that’s the case, you can safely turn off power to your built in Wi-Fi adapter. This will save a small amount of power that could make the difference between working for 30 minutes or 35 minutes on the train-ride home.

Of course, we’re only really talking about squeezing the last few drops of power out of your battery with these settings. All the real savings are made by adjusting the basic settings to govern how long the hard-drive and screen stay on when you’re away from the laptop. However there are saving to be made here, especially with the hard disk, screen and Wi-Fi settings. These are typically some of the most power intensive devices in your laptop, so making savings where can here should increase the life of your battery. Once you’ve finished and you’re happy with the changes you’ve made, click okay to save your settings and close the screens. You may find you need to restart your computer before some of your new settings take effect.

Microsoft knows that and has created a Fix It to extend the battery life of mobile computers running Windows. The Fix It furthermore can be used to troubleshoot power consumption problems on the system.

Fix Its are tiny programs designed to troubleshoot, repair or optimize features and functions of the Windows operating system.

The programs can be started right after they have been downloaded to the local computer system. This particular Fix It can be run automatically or manually. When run automatically, it will scan power related settings and correct issues that have been found automatically. While that’s probably the better options for users without computing experience, it is suggested to run the manual power settings scan instead for detailed information about suggested fixes before they are applied to the operating system.

All power issues that have been found by the scan are listed, giving the user the chance to analyze them before they are applied.

Hovering the mouse cursor over a suggested fix displays a tooltip with additional information. These are usually good enough to understand the issue at hand. Checkboxes are provided to uncheck fixes so that they are not applied on the system.

A click on next runs the fixes that have not been unchecked. This does not take longer than a few seconds the most.

Some of the issues that the Fix It finds are:

• Period of time before the computer goes to sleep is set too long
• Screen saver is used instead of setting the computer to enter sleep mode
• Display brightness is set too high
• Power plan is not set to the most efficient power plan
• Wireless adaptor in not optimized for power saving
• Minimum processor state is set too high

Windows users can download the power consumption Fix It from the official Microsoft Support website. (via)

Aerofoil is another program that can help extend Windows Vista laptop battery life by turning off Windows Aero and the Windows Sidebar.

Aerofoil does not rely on the Microsoft .net Framework on the other hand which is probably the most important factor. The computer memory footprint of Aerofoil is therefor much smaller than that of the other program. Plus, it does not require that a specific Microsoft .Net Framework version is installed on the computer to function at all.

The program can be selected to run at startup. It will place a icon in the system tray which can be used to quickly access the available options seen above. It is probably a good idea to have this or any of the other tools running on Vista laptops that run on battery.

Update: Aerofoil has been updated lately. It now supports both Windows Vista and Windows 7. The program’s feature set has also been extended with the more recent updates. In particular, it can be used for the following purposes:

• Disable Aero Glass manually
• Manage the Windows Aero user interface
• Manage power plans of the operating system
• Manage the sidebar of Windows Vista
• Enable a quick hibernate button.

The program has not been tested extensively under Windows 7. The developer notes however that it should provide the same functionality on that operating system.

That’s usually not a problem unless the applications used demand lots of cpu power. That’s not the case when surfing the Internet, creating spreadsheets or writing a Word document. Both Intel and AMD provide techniques that reduce the cpu frequency of the laptop.

SpeedswitchXP is a small applet sitting in the system tray that makes use of those techniques. It provides access to four settings: Max. performance, Battery optimized, Max. battery and dynamic switching.

Max. performance is the default setting for the laptop. The cpu is running at full speed with it. Battery optimized reduces CPU speed while max. battery reduces the cpu speed even further for maximum battery capacity. Dynamic switching is the last option which dynamically changes the cpu frequency depending on demand.

SpeedswitchXP is an old software program. It was updated in 2006 the last time but it should work fine with several relatively new cpus like Intel’s core duo series.

Users who have used Intel’s Speedstep application for Windows 9x, ME and 2000 in the past will see many similarities between the two applicatons. SpeedswitchXP is providing additional options on the other hand and support for Windows XP.

Is it working for the cpu build into your laptop? I honestly cannot answer that question. The best bet is to try it out and see if it works.

The software offers a pre-defined sets of colors that have names such as Patriotic, My Eyes!! and Winter displaying small preview images of the colors that are cycled through. If you take Winter for example you see white and icy colors when you click on edit.

It is furthermore possible to add colors to the cycle and even create your own. While this is nice for presentation it does not really add something to your daily routine. There is however an interesting option for notebook users.

You may either change the color to a darker one when you use the notebook battery only which would result in lesser power consumption or change the color according to the battery life. This would cycle the color from white to a darker color as well depending on the power level of the battery.