Get better battery life under XP

If, like me, you run a Windows XP-based laptop and wonder why your battery life doesn't seem to be as good as it ought to be, or as it used to be, it could be that you lost some battery life when updating to Windows XP SP2. It turns out that there's a bug that can cause XP to leave your USB2 ports powered even when they don't need to be, which forces the operating system to not drop into the proper ACPI processor idle sleep state.

Now there's no guarantee that installing this hot-fix from Microsoft will increase your battery life, since they don't provide any sort of mechanism to see whether or not your setup is affected by this bug. But if you suspect you're not getting the kind of battery life you should be, it's probably worth giving the hot-fix a try.

Tags: battery life, BatteryLife, freeware, laptop battery, laptop battery life, laptop power, LaptopBattery, LaptopBatteryLife, LaptopPower, mobile, mobile power, MobilePower, osupdates