In these days of ever-increasing mobile computing, laptop power consumption is ever more important. But paying attention to laptop power consumption is not important just for the user; increased use of battery-powered laptops results in lower IT power consumption costs. Computer usage is responsible for 7% to 18% of the electricity bill for a medium-sized company. While hardware providers are increasing battery life, It is critical that software developers don't inadvertently undercut those gains through their application's power draining practices.

A very good PDC session by Pat Stemen, Extending Battery Life with Energy Efficient Applications, includes a detailed explanation of the technological improvements in Windows 7 and the tools that come with it. Power management in Windows 7 will be a topic for future blog posts. In this blog post we will look at Vista’s power management APIs and focus on the managed power wrapper in the new release of the Windows Vista Bridge Library.

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