A better notebook battery monitor is Power Meter Plus. The software is completely free for private use. It can be installed or used as a portable application and runs fine on all Windows operating systems prior to Windows Vista. So every Microsoft operating system that has been released after Windows 3.11 and before Windows Vista should be able to run this little application without problems.

Power Meter Plus will display a battery monitor in the left and / or right corner of the computer screen. That power meter appears gradually over time as the power levels drop and will be more prominent the less it gets. The meter will automatically move to the left or right side of the screen depending on the position of the computer mouse.

A few settings are provided that can be used to configure the notebook battery monitor. The critical battery level and the level when it is seen as full can be defined. It is furthermore possible to change the drain and charging colors and to display messages when the critical battery level is reached or when the power source is switched.

Related posts

• Battery Care Manages Laptop Batteries (4)
• Youtube Video Search Is A Barebone Youtube Downloader (2)
• Xkcd Comic Wallpaper Changer (2)
• Wireless Networking Software Homedale (13)
• Windows XP: Default Internet Browser Per User Profile (0)

One of the bet ways to save battery is by reducing the power of several core components such as the processor or graphic adapters.

Notebook Hardware Control is a free software program that has been designed to take care of the needs of notebook users. Power management is however only one – very extensive – option of the software.

The software comes preinstalled with several hardware profiles like max. battery, dynamic switching or battery optimized. These profiles can be easily set by right-clicking the icon in the System Tray.

The maximum battery setting can for example be used to use the notebook for as long as possible while dynamic switching ensures that battery life will be saved as long as the system does not need additional power.

It is also possible to customize those settings further by defining multipliers and voltage settings manually.

Next to that are similar options for the video card and hard disk. The hard disk settings go further by providing access to advanced power management and acoustic management settings. An Advanced Configuration and Power Interface system can be enabled as well.

Notebook Hardware Control is a software program that is compatible with 32-bit editions of Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista. It requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 or higher.

Related posts

• Test your notebooks battery (0)
• Web Browser Have Impact On Battery Life (1)
• Track your stolen computer with Locate PC (10)
• Track the location of your notebook with Adeona (3)
• Run something if battery is (dis)connected (3)

The Wlan – Network Card example was just one possibility. Many notebooks have a card reader, DVD drive, webcams and V.90 Modems among other components. My notebook for example offers both Wlan and LAN access and I have disabled the network card which had the positive side effect that it reduced the boot time of my notebook.

I disabled the card reader and the internal modem as well because I never use those components. The DVD drive is disabled as well most of the time because I rarely use it. I don’t have the necessary test equipment to test the battery usage before and after disabling the components but I can verify that the boot process into Windows is faster than before.

Related posts

• Notebook Hardware Control (6)
• Display Notebook Battery Status (6)
• Windows Vista Aero Color Transform (4)
• Windows EeePC 900 cheaper than Linux model (6)
• Useful Notebook Tools (1)

It takes just one look and you see a very accurate estimate of how much time you have left before you need to plug the notebook into a power source. Double-clicking the system tray icon of BattStatt will load the main program window which displays additional valuable information.

You can compare the current notebook battery capacity with the one when the notebook was shipped and analyze a graph that displays several important figures such as Battery Life, Charge level and CPU speed. Another excellent function are the so called power schemes which can be changed in the main window as well.

BattStatt provides an additional toolbar that can be placed anywhere on screen displaying various information such as battery left and drain status.

This is an excellent application that can be run from anywhere, no installation is required.

via [Cybernet News]

Related posts

• Notebook Tip: Disable Hardware that you do not use (3)
• Notebook Hardware Control (6)
• Notebook Battery Monitor (9)
• Essential Freeware Utilities for Notebooks (0)
• ZoneScreen Finally Gets 64-bit Update (7)

We can disable and enable devices using a Microsoft tool called Devcon that is a command line alternative to the device manager. I will show you how to use devon to disable and enable devices using two simple batch files and the command line. Please download devcon from Microsoft and unpack it afterwards.

Open the command line in Windows by pressing Windows R, typing cmd and pressing enter. Now navigate to the directory that devcon has been unpacked into. You change directories using the command cd and hard drives by typing their drive letter . To change the directory to drive f you would use type f: for instance.

Now that we are in the directory where devcon.exe is located use the following command to create a list of all devices of the computer:

devcon find * > c:\devices.txt

This will save the device list as a text document in your c:\ hard drive. Please note that is is important to not disable system components that are needed. It is safe to disable components like WLAN, modem, sound cards, cd and dvd drives, secondary hard drives and the like if you do not need them right now. Never disable motherboard components, cpu, ram, display, video card and primary hard drives.

The devices document has a unique identifier on the left side and a description of the device on the right side. We need to use the unqiue identifier to disable and enable devices. We will use the entry for my 3,5″ floppy drive as an example. The unique identifier of the floppy drive is FDC\GENERIC_FLOPPY_DRIVE\5&6EDBAB&0&0

devcon disable FDC\GENERIC_FLOPPY_DRIVE\5&6EDBAB&0&0
devcon enable FDC\GENERIC_FLOPPY_DRIVE\5&6EDBAB&0&0

Those are the two commands that we work with. It is possible to use wildcards if the remaining name clearly identifies the device, I would suggest to always use the full name.

Create a file called stop-devices.bat and add all devcon disable commands to it. Each command will be written in its own row.
Now create a file called start-devices.bat and add all devcon enable commands in it in the same way. Make sure both are placed in the same directory that devcon.exe is placed in.

A double-click on one of the bat files will disable or enable all devices mentioned in there. You could use the command line as well to disable or enable a device to see how it works. Just use the full command to do this.

Related posts

• Windows Vista Aero Color Transform (4)
• Notebook Tip: Disable Hardware that you do not use (3)
• Notebook Hardware Control (6)
• Notebook Battery Monitor (9)
• Display Notebook Battery Status (6)

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.

Related posts

• Vista Battery Saver Beta (2)
• Extend Windows Vista Laptop Battery Life With Aerofoil (5)
• Yuck new Windows Vista Ultimate Extras (20)
• XP SP3 and Vista SP 1 available through Windows Update (6)
• WPF Performance Fix for Windows Vista and XP (1)