OPTIMIZE YOUR NOTEBOOK

Network garbage is like desktop garbage, only worse: All that excess activity saps your systems' resources. Anything that unnecessarily drains your laptop battery deserves to get dumped. Aa quick
tune upcan make any notebook more energy efficient.

A POWER MAKEOVER

Choose the right pwer scheme for your work stule. Click Start->Control Panel-> Performance and maintainence->Power options. Under this, pick Max Battery and click OK.
This setting shuts off your monitor after 1 min and puts your notebook in standby if you dont use it for 2 mins. If thats too soon, repeat the steps and choose the portable/laptop power scheme which goes into standby after 5 mins.

Another way to reduce your notebook's power consumption is by dimming the screen. Unfortunately, every notebook manufacturer seems to have a different technique for dimming, so you may have to go digging in your owners manual.

A notebook's built-in wireless card sucks up power as it looks for access points, so disable yours when you're not working on a network. Other laptop power grabbers that you should unplug when you don need them are USB devices and PC cards.

CLEAN OUT THE BACKGROUND

Give autostart programs the heave-ho when you're running on battery power. In addition to following this step, right click icons in your system tray and shut down programs you dont need. They'll start up again the next time window loads.

STANDBY OR HIBERNATE?

Win XP's standbymode stops your HDD and monitor, but everything in your systems memory stays there, using a little trickle of power. Hibernation mode writes everything in memory to the hard drive and shuts down the machine completely.
Windows spriings back quickly from standby mode, but it takes much longer to come back to a working state. If you will be gone for a short while, it makes sense to leave your system on standby, else, leave your system in hibernation.