Can Vista Battery Saver save up to 70% extra battery life?
It's well documented that some of Windows Vista's desktop features don't prove quite so useful on a notebook device. Aero sure looks pretty and the Sidebar, though still lacking a decent number of good gadgets, can prove to be quite useful.
On a laptop however, these niceties are little more than battery-eating nuisances. Suffering from poor battery life myself, I've stumbled across a handy little app that goes by the name of Vista Battery Saver. No prizes for guessing what it does.
More interesting is how it does it. Vista Battery Saver will run quietly in the taskbar, using little to no CPU usage and minimal memory, it configures your laptop to deactivate the Windows Aero interface and Windows Sidebar as and when needed.
You can configure each, or both, to deactivate automatically when running on battery, or when your battery falls below a defined level of life remaining. The developer of the app, Tamir Khason, claims Vista Battery Saver "will save up to 70% of your battery by disabling those nice, but greedy Vista features". I'm not entirely confident I'll see results quite that drastic, but it's a handy little app to have nonetheless.
Vista Battery Saver became an open source application last July and is available from Codeplex.com
