Batteries. If there’s one weakpoint of the mobile PC, it’s the battery. Manufacturers are aware of it. Consumers are pissed with it. And so marketers hype up revolutionary new battery technologies that apparently give your laptop up to 11 hours life.
Yeah right.
11 hours. On certain conditions. First you gotta crank down the brightness to near-midnight levels. Then Wi-Fi must go, so there goes the web. Perhaps you even have to close extra apps, save for that boring Word document. After all, an idle CPU is a long lasting CPU.
To their credit, battery manufacturers have gotten better. But better is relative. To truly enjoy prolonged computing hours, you have to chuck out that stylish slim batt and go back to having a fat batt. It’s in the number of cells after all that provides the juice to power that starved core 2 duo.
While we wait for that much coveted 24-hour laptop battery, try some software alternatives to squeeze out more juice from that huffing laptop. I’ve rounded up a few stellar apps that may just add 10% to 50% more life to your aging Toshiba.
Aerofoil
Aerofoil is a nifty tool that turns off Windows Aero graphics and manage other Windows options, like sound muting, the Windows sidebar, and your power profile, whenever you jerk the power cord. It’s pretty much fire and forget after you set up the configuration. In use, I’ve found it to give me some 45 more minutes extra computing time.
SetPower
SetPower lets you assign a time to your existing power profiles. You can preset the periods when you’ll want your notebook to kick into high-performance mode or power-saving mode. So, if you know you’re regularly travelling from 6am to 9am, you can set it to power saving mode. Then when you know the unit will be chained to a power outlet from 10am to 3pm, you can make it auto default to max power. Like the previous app, it’s fire and forget.
BatteryBar
Most XP and Vista users don’t have the luxury of knowing exactly how much power is left. You can hover the mouse over the batt icon, but it just says 50%. 50% is what? One hour? Thirty minutes? Percentages don’t help. Battery bar changes that. It gives you the exact time left after profiling your charge and drain cycles. You’ll also be warned when the battery needs to be chucked in the trash.
