Windows 7: Articles

Life as a digital road warrior revolves around one thing: electricity. Where can you plug in? For how long? And how much can you stretch your battery between outlets? When it comes to surviving between charges, every little bit helps.

Windows 7 provides some new functionality for controlling how much juice your laptop spends when it’s untethered from the wall. These options won’t do you much good, however, unless you’re following some basic power management practices.

The Basics: Power Profiles and Screen Brightness
Click on the battery icon in your system tray, and you’ll see your most basic options for controlling power.

The two power profiles shown by default are Balanced and Power Saver. Balanced is usually what you want when you’re plugged in. It provides maximum power to your devices when necessary, and otherwise seeks to conserve energy during idle times.

Power Saver is the setting you want when you’re operating off of battery, as it curtails power waste (though sometimes at the expense of system performance).

If you click More Power Options and then select Show additional plans on Windows 7, you’ll see a third power option, High Performance. All that this setting does is prevent your disk, screen and other system components from powering down even when they’re idle.

For the vast majority of users, the Balanced plan is the best choice when plugged in.

The other important option available off of More Power Options is the Screen brightness control at the bottom. This setting is relative to your current power source.

In other words, you can make your screen bright when it’s plugged in and dimmer when it’s unplugged, and Windows 7 will adjust your screen brightness automatically. This provides huge savings in battery power.

Now, you might think that Windows 7 would be extra useful, and allow you to specify that you automatically wanted to switch to Power Saver mode when you’re not plugged in. Sadly, you’d be wrong.

It’s your responsibility to switch between Balanced and Power Saver when you go from working in the office to working on the go. (There are some utilities that correct this deficiency in Windows 7; we’ll discuss those in another article.)

Advanced: Turning Off Unneeded Devices
One thing laptop users often overlook is the presence of unused peripherals, both attached and built in to the system. If you’re not connected to a network using your laptop’s built-in wireless card, why do you need it on?

Similarly, there’s no reason to keep your smart card reader plugged in if you’re not using it to access corporate resources. These devices consume power. Removing them will give you extra battery life for important tasks.

The New Hotness: Advanced Battery Settings
If you adjust your power manager settings when you leave the office, adjust your screen brightness when the laptop’s unplugged, and turn off unnecessary devices when you’re on the go, you’ll be doing most everything you can to conserve battery life.

But Windows 7 gives you even finer grained control of how much processing power you want to supply to multimedia applications. Click More Power Options from the battery indicator box, then click Change plan settings for the Power Saver plan.

On the next dialog, click Change advanced power settings. Windows 7 will give you a list of options for controlling how much power to give to devices, and how much energy to spend on playing videos or sharing media with other computers.

Tweaking these settings probably won’t save you a wallop of battery power, but they will let you specify how to direct the power you have. For example, if you’re using your laptop primarily to watch movies on a bus or an airplane, you may want to specify that video playback is slanted toward maximum video quality, even if you otherwise want your laptop to conserve power.

Tweak the various available options, and see what works best for your needs.