Mar 22
It is the future and the joy of going to work involves a quick car booking and then off to office in a driver-less car. To put things into perspective, … Continue reading
Mar 22
This article was written on May 15, 2007 by CyberNet.
There is a lot of talk going around the Web regarding Vista’s Aero interface eating up precious battery life on laptops. Today the Windows Vista Blog responded to the concerns that a lot of people had by saying:
First off, yes, as Dwight correctly points out, the Aero theme drives the GPU harder and therefore uses more power. But in the big picture, it’s really not that much more. For example, the display on most laptops will consume somewhere between 15-25% of your “power budget” when you are running on battery. Nevertheless, in our testing we’ve seen that turning on Aero consumes only about 1-4% more of battery life. In terms of making your battery last longer, turning off Aero will not go very far while at the same time costing you some of the cool features that make Windows Vista fun to use, such as Flip 3D, taskbar previews, window transparency and so on.
So they do admit that having Aero enabled does cause slightly more of a battery drain, but they planned ahead and implemented something to reduce the battery consumption in Vista. If you put your laptop into Power Saver mode (left-click on the battery icon in the System Tray), and then unplug the computer you’ll notice that Vista automatically disabled the transparency feature. All of the other Aero features still remain in tact, such as the Flip 3D and Taskbar previews, but some of the eye candy has been removed. It might not be much but this does indeed save battery power.
If that’s still not enough for you there is an application that someone made to help even more. Whenever this program is running it will disable Aero all together (no Flip 3D, Taskbar previews, transparency, etc…) as soon as your computer switches to battery power. This is supposed to maximize your battery life, but from my personal experience it doesn’t really help that much.
I definitely recommend switching into Power Saver mode if you are ever trying to conserver battery power. When I do that with my PC I end up with more battery life than when I run XP on it. Of course there is always the High Performance mode that you can switch into if you really want to see how fast you can drain your battery. 🙂
Note: With a fully charged battery in Balanced mode (and running dual-monitors with full screen brightness) I get an estimated 3 hours and 18 minutes of battery life. Switching over to Power Saver mode, still with full screen brightness, I am estimated to get 4 hours and 4 minutes.
Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com
Mar 22
For whatever reason, one of the Gizmodo writers posted an image of an old AOL free trial disc in our staff-wide chat the other day. One thousand hours free for 45 days! This, of course, started us all down a road of weird nostalgia, recalling how we used (or misused) the World Wide Web back in the twilight of the 90s. What were you doing on The Internet back then?
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Mar 22
This week in Tech Reads: micro-entrepreneurship, New Mexico’s curious investment in space tourism, a
Posted in: Today's Chili
This week in Tech Reads: micro-entrepreneurship, New Mexico’s curious investment in space tourism, and the history of the veggie burger. And so much more!
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Mar 22
Chinese electronics manufacturer Huawei decided to withdraw from U.S. business last year
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Mar 22
One of the reasons why we were so excited about the “Star Trek Into Darkness” movie was the fact that it was being made with the Dolby Atmos technology. Now … Continue reading
Mar 22
The idea of the gamepad is so entrenched in our mind, it’s easy to forget that there are other ways to play video games. No, we’re not talking about the PC gamer’s keyboard and mouse, or even the traditional arcade stick — but custom, purpose built…
Mar 22
Smartwatches will be everywhere this year. With Google announcing Android Wear and companies already showing off devices at CES and Mobile World Congress, it won’t be long before a slew … Continue reading
Mar 22
If we have to get advertising everywhere, is should all be as fun as this bus shelter ad in London, where they used augmented reality to make passengers believe that meteors were striking the city or a tiger was freely roaming through the street.
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Mar 22
This week rocked us with big news in astronomy, big dangerous hacking attempts, and the discovery that bugs are already immune to supposedly bug-proof GMO corn. Let’s take a victory lap on the week, shall we?
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