Windows Vista Notebook Battery Saver

I have published an article a few days ago about Windows Vista's battery hunger. What is meant by that is that Vista appears to drain battery of mobile devices faster than XP did.

This is apparently caused by the Vista Aero theme that consumes a lot of power which in turn reduces battery life on notebooks by a measurable amount. One of my suggestions back then was to disable the Aero theme completely which is not really practicable if you want to work with Aero whenever the notebook is connected to a power source.

The software Vista Laptop Battery Saver aims to help out users who run Vista on a mobile device. The memory resident software waits in the background and springs into action when the notebook is changing into battery mode. It will disable the Windows Vista Aero theme completely if the mode change is detected, which in turn means that you can work longer in battery mode.

You may need at least some getting used to time until you do not mind the automatic theme changing anymore as it is an abrupt visual change.

The application recognizes when a power source is connected to the notebook and turn on the Aere theme again when that is happening. This is probably the best solution if you want to work with Aero when you have a power source connected to your notebook. I decided to get rid of Aero completely and work with a custom theme which does not consume that much power.

Update: Service Packs and patches released for the Windows Vista operating system have resolved the situation somewhat. It appears as if the Windows Aero theme is not draining as much battery anymore than before. It is therefore recommended to download and install all Vista Service Packs and patches that Microsoft has made available in the meantime.

The easiest way to download the updates is via the operating system's built-in Windows Update applet. Vista users can run it from the start menu of their operating system.

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