Laptop | Technology Blog

Notebook Hardware Control

December 14th, 2008

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When you are working with notebooks on the road you have to ensure that you make the best of the remaining battery power. Nothing’s more annoying than a notebook that is automatically powering down because of a battery running out of power. One way to take care of this problem is to reduce the power needed when working with a notebook running on battery.

One of the bet ways to save battery is by reducing the power of several core components such as the processor or graphic adapters.

Notebook Hardware Control is a free software program that has been designed to take care of the needs of notebook users. Power management is however only one - very extensive - option of the software.

SpeedswitchXP Laptop CPU Frequency Control

August 20th, 2008

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Laptop users love batteries that last longer. At least those laptop users who use their laptop on the road, those desktop replacement laptops are usually to big and heavy to be carried around anyway. One of the best ways to extend battery life is to reduce the cpu frequency of the laptop.

That’s usually not a problem unless the applications used demand lots of cpu power. That’s not the case when surfing the Internet, creating spreadsheets or writing a Word document. Both Intel and AMD provide techniques that reduce the cpu frequency of the laptop.

SpeedswitchXP is a small applet sitting in the system tray that makes use of those techniques. It provides access to four settings: Max. performance, Battery optimized, Max. battery and dynamic switching.

Track the location of your notebook with Adeona

July 14th, 2008

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Adeona is a free Open-Source software that works completely independent. The application is running in the background and automatically recognizes a change of location by analyzing the network connection of the notebook. If someone would connect to a WLAN the software would automatically do IP lookups to determine the current location of the notebook.

Those information would then be compiled, encrypted and the OpenDHT distributed storage service is used to store location update of the notebook. Those location updates can then be retrieved from another computer revealing information about IP addresses (internal and external), the time, access points and nearby routers.

This information can be filtered to display only data of a specific date range. This should be tested at least once to make sure everything has been setup correctly.

Track your stolen computer with Locate PC

May 17th, 2008

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If you travel a lot chance is that you will eventually fall victim to theft. If you happen to have your notebook or laptop with you most of the time chance is pretty high that the thief will have the desire to steal that one. Chances are pretty slim that you will see your notebook again after the theft but you can increase them a bit by using Locate PC.

Locate PC only works if the thief is stupid enough to boot your computer while being connected to an internet connection. I cannot truly say how many thiefs would do that but it can happen and that’s probably reason enough to use Locate PC. A slim chance is better than no chance at all, don’t you think ?

Locate PC (via Cybernet News) will send emails periodically whenever the PC is connected to the Internet, by default one email is send per day and another one for every IP change. The application is running in the background with an obscured filename and no system tray icon making it harder to identify. I would say that you do not need to worry about that though, if the thief truly boots the PC while it is connected to the Internet then you should not fear that he will discover the little tracking application.