Courtesy of PC Magazine

Nice.

Thanks to you, rowal5555, and PC Mag, of course.

Tip 40 makes me do a double-take -

the Power Plans -

Balanced (balancing battery life and performance),

Power Saver (maximizing battery life and minimizing performance),

and High Performance (maximizing performance and minimizing battery life).

The Balanced plan makes sense as the default for notebooks, but why would it be the default for a desktop? Or is it? Maybe someone running Vista on a desktop can check this setting for us?

In a very unscientific test - using the CPU Meter gadget that comes with Vista - I wasn't able to notice any discernable speed differences when using either the Balanced or High Performance plans on my notebook PC.

I don't run Vista yet so am just passing on the info without knowledge or comment. Cheers

Balanced is the default for desktops as well.

The power saving settings determins when and how it puts stuff to sleep, like hard drives, display, indexing, USB, wireless and Dream Scene. Staring at the CPU meter while using the computer won't tell you anything.

That's the way I would normally have interpreted the power "plans", too. However, the PC Mag writer is implying that the CPU will actually run at 50% in "balanced" and at 100% speed at "high performance".

Here's a different 50 tips (51 actually):
ITsVISTA Tips

Oh, man -

I just memorized the first 50.