Previously, I wrote about PowerSlave and BattCursor tool for laptop battery. Here is one more extremely useful tool Aerofoil which helps you to extend & improve Laptop battery life when you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7 as your OS.

Aerofoil is a small tray utility for Windows Vista and Windows 7 to automatically disable the Windows Aero Glass interface, and optionally switch Windows Power Plans, Windows Sidebar and sound off when your notebook computer runs on battery.

Aero Glass is re-enabled on program exit or whenever it is connected to the AC power again. In addition it also provides other useful features such as a quick hibernate shutdown option and manual control of Aero Glass.

Aerofoil will also show whether your system is on battery or AC by the color of the tray icon it has, red is battery and green is AC.

Download Aerofoil

Windows Vista and Windows 7 has a very good power management scheme, which can be customize as per your requirements. But if you want to change the power plans automatically; for example, during your working hours you would prefer high performance, but at night, a power saver plan would be good. You can not do it with the default power management scheme. This is a very useful feature which is missing in the default windows power management scheme.

PowerSlave is a free windows utility which allows you to control the power management scheme in windows. It allows you to define your working day start time and end time. It then lets the user choose one power scheme that will be used during the working day and a second power scheme that will be used at night.

PowerSlave runs from the system tray. It monitors the time and switches the power schemes automatically. If PowerSlave is not able to run properly, you will need to give full control for the application in Vista and Windows 7 (or run as administrator).

The advantage of using PowerSlave is the savings in energy and power and in turn savings in cost. Please note that PowerSlave is FREE only for personal use.

Download PowerSlave

BattCursor is a free utility which shows a battery charge in percentage directly below the mouse cursor. In addition to this it includes the functions of increasing the battery runtime. Including dimming down the display brightness by inactivity and automatically disable the Windows Sidebar and Aero glass.

The important feature of this BattCursor utility is that it always displays the remaining battery percentage under the mouse cursor which is seen all the time to the user, this could be really useful when you working on something important and your laptop is running out of low battery. You can explore this utility to customize the various types of alerts related to battery.

The requirement for using this application is a laptop with any version of Windows Vista or Windows 7 installed and .Net Framework 2.0 or later installed.

Download BattCursor (Size: 596 KB)