A handy Vista tool to help the battery problem

Clearly Vista users are rather miffed about Vista and battery life problems I almost feel like I should create a category just for this one issue.

Just yesterday I told you about turning off the Aero theme to give you a boost. But what if you like the Aero theme when you’re plugged in? Switching all the time is rather annoying (and a bit time consuming truth be told) so wouldn’t it be great if there was an app that did this for you automatically when you switch to battery? Guess what, there is!

Found via Experience Mobility (and also mentioned on JKOnTheRun and GHacks) is the Vista Battery Saver. It’s out in beta right now and only works on Home Premium and Business (I assume Ultimate too). What it does is to run in the background and sense when you switch to battery and when you do turn off Aero and close the sidebar. The install looked like it worked, but it didn’t show up on the status bar until after a reboot. My test with just pulling the plug was sorta successful. The sidebar went and away and Aero features disappeared, but when I plugged back in they didn’t come back. Truth be told, I think this isn’t a fair test because I did this before I rebooted so I don’t know if it had been fully loaded into memory.

Right now, I’d say download it, install it, reboot and give it a shot.

Tags: Vista tips, Vista laptop tips, Vista tweaks, Vista downloads, Vista laptop battery, free downloads, free software