Use Power Management for Mobile Computer Hardware

Windows 7 includes several features that are particularly useful for laptop computers. For example, through Power Options in Control Panel, you can select a power plan and enable power-management features with Windows 7.

Recognizing the Improvements to Power Management

Windows 7 builds on the power-management features that were introduced with Windows XP with the following enhancements:

• Battery meter, which provides a notification icon in the system tray that details the computer's battery power
• Power plans, which are collections of hardware and software settings optimized for a specific function
• Sleep power state, which combines the speed of standby with the features of hibernate mode
• ReadyDrive, which provides faster booting and resume times when used in conjunction with ReadyDrive-capable hard drives

After exploring some of the features of Windows 7 Power Management, let's look at managing the various power options.