Recently I’ve downloaded and installed Notebook Hardware Control. Its a freeware application that lets you monitor and adjust many aspects of your computer’s hardware. One of my favorite features are the real time graphs that show you your battery charge level, and better yet, your current battery charge rate. The great thing about the battery charge rate graph is that you can see exactly how much power your notebook/tablet/UMPC is consuming. Its a really nice tool if you are looking to optimize your system for maximum battery life. To turn on the graphs, after installing NHC, right click on one of the task bar icons and click “Show”. Find the STATUS tab, and the notebook graphic in the middle right of that page. Underneath it are three buttons, one of which looks like a play button. Press that and you should see some graphs appear on your screen. Click the button that looks like two gears to configure settings for the graphs.

I’d like to see what kind of levels other people are getting on not only their UMPCs, but notebook/tablets as well. My UX consumes around five watts of power while doing standard tasks such as internet browsing, with a brightness level of three. During high activity such as watching a flash video, my UX uses around eight watts. In hold mode, the level drops down around three, and the fan seems to contribute to around two watts of power consumption. I was fairly surprised to find that taking the screen brightness from its maximum level (ten) down to its minimum (one) had very little noticeable impact on the charge rate. Probably because the screen size is so small compared to a full sized notebook. Even turning off the wireless radios didn’t do very much, it seems like they consume lots of power only while they are being utilized in a current connection. Otherwise if they aren’t transferring any data, they have a pretty small draw on the battery. My UX’s charge rate while plugged in is around +eight watts. Lets hear from other people. Of course feel free to play with the other settings that NHC, some of the more experienced out there can probably drop the clock speed on your device as well as the voltage for additional power savings. Please don’t play with those values if you don’t know what you are doing! Note: Don’t underclock the UX’s CPU down to 12.5% of its maximum capacity, you don’t like the results!