The Award Winning Aerofoil has now been updated to 1.5.0!
Aerofoil extends Vista and Windows 7 notebook battery life by:
- Allowing you to manually disable Aero Glass.
- Optionally managing Aero Glass user interface.
- Optionally managing sound muting (NEW!).
- Optionally managing YOUR chosen power plans (NEW!)
- Optionally managing Windows Sidebar.
- Optionally showing a quick hibernate button
- Changing icon colour to show your power type (NEW!)
Benefits over earlier versions and similar software:
- Much more efficient - Aerofoil is 100% unmanaged C++ (no .Net Framework!).
- Much smaller memory use (about 25%-30% of the size of similar software).
- Unlike other apps, Aerofoil doesn't poll battery level continuously allowing the CPU save power by being idle more often.
- UPX compressed meaning Aerofoil.exe is as small as it can be.
- No configuration file - everything is customised with the installer.
- Tried and tested on Windows 7 (thanks to D. Schiferli!)
- Open source and free - no expiry date, adware, spyware or malware, download and compile it for yourself if you prefer*!
What reviewers of Aerofoil 1.4.5 have had to say:
"This is definitely a worth-while little app for road warriors"
(Metro Area Personal Computer Club, Iowa, USA)
"great for gaming and notebook applications alike"
(Official Windows Magazine - 47th of top 100, 37th of top 40 Hot Apps / TechRadar)
"Aerofoil, though, is far, far smaller and more efficient"
(Dave Johnson, Bnet)
The great advantage of AeroFoil is little resource consumption..... works perfectly with Windows 7"
(Kavya, Techno360)
"a must for every Vista laptop user."
(Wim Van Acoleyen, ZDNet)
"Great utility for gamers and laptop users."
(The Glitch)
"simple yet amazingly effective software that the corporate bigwigs couldn't figure out"
(Umar, Techtites)
Downloads
Download Aerofoil 1.5.0_02 Installer
Download Aerofoil 1.5.0_02 Source Code (C++)
If you use Windows Vista and receive the message "Side-by-side configuration is incorrect" you may also need a Vista update - the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable
* Note Aerofoil.exe is compressed using UPX so you will find your compiled executable is larger. You can find UPX here.
10 comments:
Any chance of making disabling aero toggleable? Windows 7 automatically turns off aero glass when in power saver mode, and it looks a little better than aero basic.
This happens automatically on my Windows 7 laptop. It's on the balanced plan so my guess is that there's an option in the advanced power management settings.
Hi (my name is) Karl,
I'll look to remove the Aero disabling function in Windows 7 in 1.5.1. I don't like UI clutter so I'll probably just have an installer option (rather than a right click icon checkbox option) to allow Windows 7 to manage Aero Glass instead. The existing manual Enable/Disable Aero Glass will still be there since that is still useful.
Benjamin
How about adding a simple settings dialog... to the rt. click menu? I guess it'd be easier to change settings without having to reinstall the app. over again.
Hi Agnivom (and others),
I've been asked this question a lot, so I'll answer for other users too...
One of the things I was striving for in Aerofoil is simplicity. Adding a new dialog would mean additional code for a Settings screen, input validation, storing the settings (and file saving/loading management), etc etc. This to my mind is not bloat you want in a tiny app that is just meant to sit in the background. This is why Aerofoil lacks the extensive UI options screen you see in other similar programs*, but it also keeps it efficient and small, it has minimal CPU usage (no polling battery state for example which I believe other apps do) and minimal memory usage. Having the installer configure Aerofoil allows you to have it custom configured to your particular system and how you'd like it, and since really the defaults should only be changed once or twice I believe this to be an acceptable tradeoff, although I know other people disagree.
*please have a look at _actual_ memory usage of other similar programs - see the "commit" size - this is how much is set aside as temporary disk space, and working set, how much external code like UI libraries, runtime etc, is pulled in. An earlier version screenshot comparision on the link below (but is by no means unique to the one app I compared):
http://silentdevelopment.blogspot.com/2008/09/aerofoil-144-rated-47100-hot-100-vista.html
Having a large .Net runtime or extra code running defeats the purpose of having an app meant to save you cpu cycles and battery :)
As a side note - when Aerofoil has been running for a while it's actual memory usage drops to less than 600K (usually) :)
I hope this helps explain its slightly awkward configuration and why the application lacks certain features. :)
Best regards,
Benjamin
P.S. C++ source code is available so anybody is welcome to add a user interface if they want... GPL licenced of course. :)
Loving Aerofoil on my Acer Aspire One D250 with Windows 7 HP, so I had to write about and recommend it on my blog at
http://dieselliveson.blogspot.com/2009/11/aerofoil-software-for-netbooks.html
Thanks for a great little tool.
I like to save all setup files somewhere so that whenever I need to reformat, I have everything I need.
Anyway, I tried renaming the setup file and discovered that after doing that, setup doesn't ever open. I double click on it, but nothing pops up, doesn't show up in task manager, nothing.
Just FYI.
Oh yeah, and the installer didn't put a readme.txt into the installed Aerofoil directory!
Hi Timothy,
Thanks for your feedback. I have no idea what could be causing your rename issue but I'll have a look into it within the next 48 hours. You didn't mention your specific setup (Win Vista/7 32/64 bit) or the version you are using (I assume the latest?) this would be useful to help me test.
As for the readme.txt I'm stumped - what very odd behaviour - this may be some sort of copy bug with the installer compiler - which is not something I can fix since it's not aerofoil code although it may be down to your specific OS configuration.
Thanks again for using this free software and giving your feedback,
Benjamin
Hi Timothy,
I did a bit of investigating (at 2.55am here) and found the following:
1: I can't prevent the renaming the executable problem - NSIS (the program creating the Aerofoil installer) seems to have a bug with the program name being in the installer (i.e. aerofoil_setup_1.5.0_02.exe fails, but remove the "l" from aerofoil and it appears to work).
2: I botched the installer on the 1.5.0 to 1.5.0_01 update -sorry- see my latest blog post for more info.
The links have been updated.
Apologies for the (second) issue you've had - please get the 1.5.0_02 release instead.
Benjamin
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