Aerofoil

Aerofoil is a Windows freebie designed to improve laptop battery life by disabling certain features of the operating system on the go.

As we all know by now, Microsoft has equipped its operating system with multiple power profiles, just to make sure those using portable computers can benefit from extended battery life too.

Well, Aerofoil is supposed to do even more than that, planning to disable specific Windows features with a single click.

The installation process plays a key role, especially because it prompts you to set up several important parameters that concern the overall functionality of the program.

You are thus asked to choose the two profiles you wish to switch to when using the computer on battery and on AC, but also configure the actions performed by Aerofoil. You can for instance let it manage the power plan, control volume muting and Windows Sidebar, enable the Hibernate option and display notification messages.

The application places an icon in the Windows System Tray, letting you control all of its features with a simple click on this icon. As you can see, it has the power to disable the Aero interface of the operating system, disable the sidebar, switch to mute and control the power plan for extended battery life.

Aerofoil has a minimum footprint on hardware resources, working smoothly on all Windows versions.

Overall, this tiny application does what it says, although more configuration options would come in handy to all of its users. It’s easy to use however and places an icon in the System Tray that provides instant access to its features.