Although there is some disagreement over whether laptop battery life has got better or worse in Windows 7 (on my laptops it has), the battery  information that Windows 7 provides is limited so it can be hard to ascertain how well your battery is performing.  A great application to install to give more Windows 7 battery information is BatteryBar, which comes in both a free and Pro version.

BatteryBar is a simple, straight-forward, battery meter that monitors the status of your battery and displays your battery’s status in the taskbar.  All data is captured so that historical performance data on your battery can be accessed so that a more accurate battery life remaining estimate can be produced – hopefully your laptop will no longer die when it’s claiming it has 1o mins of power left..

The free version of BatteryBar provides the following features:

• Statistical Time Prediction
• Always-on battery icon showing current battery status
• Create a discharge/recharge profile of your battery
• Determine “time remaining” based on historical usage profile of your battery
• Display popup window with detailed battery information
• Automatic upgrade notification popup for the latest stable release

Which is good enough for most users, although BatteryBar pro adds the following features:

• Automatic upgrade notification popup for the latest beta release
• Show low and critical battery notification warnings
• Change the current Windows power scheme
• Customize the look of BatteryBar with custom themes
• Customize when the battery is reported as at low or critical level
• Show low and critical battery warnings based on time remaining or percent remaining

More: BatteryBar

Source:

BatteryBar: Improve Windows 7 Battery Management was posted on Everything Microsoft - Latest Microsoft News, Guides, Reviews & Themes. If you are not reading this content in an email newsletter, it is being used without permission.

WinHec 2008 just started and the keynote is available in three different quality streams that can be watched online. The keynote is available as a 100K, 300K or 750K video stream. The Keynote begins with a few information for the attendees of the WinHec 2008 conference and an introduction of the keynotes that are going to follow: The video contains both the keynotes of Steven Sinofsky and Jon DeVaan and has a total playtime of 1:18 hours.

The keynotes contain some interesting information about Windows 7. One of the first presentations is comparing the boot time of Windows Vista with Windows 7. The test is running on identical hardware. Windows 7 is loaded several seconds before Windows Vista has loaded thanks to a few new features and optimizations such as:

• Increased parallel device initialization
• Less data read from disk
• Start Pearl / Sound changes
• Many detailed optimizations and enhancements

Windows memory consumption was improved in Windows 7 by making it independent of the number of open windows.

Microsoft was demonstrating the effect of opening lots of windows on Windows Vista and Windows 7. Windows Vista began to throw error messages after reaching a certain amount of open windows while Windows 7 was able to handle them without difficulties.

Another area of improvement was done to the power consumption of the operating system. Many users had the feeling that Windows 7 was using more power than previous Windows operating systems. Microsoft was demonstrating the power consumption of Windows Vista and Windows 7 on two identical laptops running a video DVD.

The Windows 7 laptop was able to last about one hour longer than the laptop running Windows Vista and the minimum gain is said to be 11% which should equal about 20 minutes of additional playback time. They are demoing some new tools to analyze the computer’s battery usage to fix errors that reduce battery life of the laptop.

Steve Sinofsky is demoing a lot of devices and how they interact with Windows 7, for example a Nokia N95 8GB, Logitech camera or Bluetooth 2.1 devices. One of the most impressive parts of the keynote is the demonstration of an Asus eeePC with 1GB Ram, 16 GB SSD hard drive and an Atom Dual Core 1.6 processor running Windows 7 as well as a gaming PC running Intel’s new Core i7 quad core processor and a Nvidia 280 GTS X2 graphics card running a Crysis demo on Windows 7.

WinHEC 2008 Keynote Summary And Recordings was posted on Everything Microsoft - Latest Microsoft News, Guides, Reviews & Themes. If you are not reading this content in an email newsletter, it is being used without permission.