Do you use a laptop computer? If so, does your battery need some extra life? Well if you are looking to extend your time a little bit, then you might want to check out this program that I came across recently called Notebook Hardware Control. You can set your power properties based on if you are on AC or on battery. Why is this useful? Doesn’t microsoft include something to adjust that automatically for you? The speed of the processor that is. Well…yes….yes they do. But. I have noticed that when using NHC and forcing it to go a certain speed, I can get more battery life out of it. When your on battery, why do you need to be at full speed? Why not half speed? That should run more than fast enough for most everyday activities(of course you can set it to run full power if you wanted…..but most people probably wouldn’t need that). So with NHC, you have settings called MAX BATTERY, MAX PERFORMANCE, BATTERY OPTIMIZED and DYNAMIC SWITCHING. When on AC, Dynamic Switching allows the computer to adjust the speed of the processor based on the load to the computer dynamically. Just running word? Run at a low speed. Playing a game? Run at high speed. Its actually pretty good on detecting which speed it needs. Max Battery sends the processor into the lowest power mode available. This allows you to use the least amount of power, but as each processor is different, your performance will change. I find with my laptop that its lowest setting(1 GHZ) is more than enough to run everything that I need to run. Since it never is allowed to go at full speed, the processor can sometimes peg out at 100%, but even if it does, it will never go above the speed its set to! Battery Optimized I really don’t know what it does, but Max Performance, it allows you to keep the processor running as fast as it can all the time, no matter the load on it. Talk about a heat producer and a waster of energy! This is good if you know that you will need the max performance frequently, other than that, I don’t know why you would want it.

So go check it out. NHC is one awesome piece of software

Categories: Tricks and Tips