Sunday, May 06, 2007

Free laptop utility to disable Aero's Glass when on battery

"Hot" on the powersave/cooling subject of my last post yesterday evening I threw together a small tray icon application Aerofoil to disable Aero's Glass interface when on battery power. Hopefully this should cut heat and increase battery length a bit!

I'm hoping Microsoft add this functionality into the standard power manangement features of Vista at some point and this isn't needed anymore, but if they don't and the utility proves popular, I may add some other powersave functionality not currently available - although I don't know what yet, maybe options to disable sound, slow down gpu clockspeeds via atitool profile or similar!

GPL'd source code will be available shortly - I've not got time at the moment to bung in the relevant licence comments, readme and package up nicely. This should be in the next day or two.

Updated version

Get Aerofoil here!
Source code


If you find this useful and want the new features please post a comment or suggestions!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sorry to say this ut Vista already does this for me automatically and it has been since I purchased my laptop with Vista preinstalled. Whenever I switch to power saver Vista changes my theme to basic. When I switch it to balanced of performance mode Aero switches on. Nevertheless this application is great so that way I wont have to be switching between power options.

Benjamin said...

I had a look into this and you are correct "Power saver" plan does do this too - however if you use any other plan as far as I can tell you cannot get Aero to switch off (no option I can see). I think Vista just does this for power saver because it is the default/undeleteable maximum battery plan.

Anonymous said...

I think you're program is very good. Personally I don't like Vista compared to XP - it may have some good features but it is a lot harder to use for the basics.