Of course, this uses
your hard disk heavily, so it??™s best to set the Power Savings Mode to
Power Saver when you??™re running on a battery.
Display
Use the Turn off display after setting as a battery-friendly alternative to
a screensaver. Since it takes very little time to wake up modern laptop
displays, set this to a small value like 5 minutes. Then set Adaptive display
to On to have Vista automatically (and temporarily) give you a little
more time whenever you seem to be frequently waking up your display.
Click OK when you??™re done; the changes take effect immediately.
To switch between power plans, just click the battery status icon in your
notification area (tray) and then click the one you want. Or, press Winkey+
X to show the Windows Mobility Center, where you can also choose
the plan you want.
Make Your Hardware Perform | 237
Performance
Switch plans automatically
Problem is, you have to switch power plans by hand, and who remembers to
do that? Wouldn??™t it be better to have the plan chosen automatically when
you switch between battery and AC power? Vista won??™t do this, but the free
Vista Battery Saver (available at http://www.codeplex.com/vistabattery, and
shown in Figure 5-7) can.
Figure 5-7. Tired of having to change the power plans every time you switch between AC
and battery power? Increase your battery life by letting the Vista Battery Saver do it for
you
238 | Chapter 5: Performance
Vista Battery Saver can also turn off the power-hungry Glass interface
when you switch battery power, a convenience that has been known to
cause huge gains in battery life.
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