Windows Vista introduced many new features including this nice utility called Windows Mobility Center which grouped all mobile features in one tool. let’s look at each of them.
Windows Vista Windows Mobility Center can be accessed by clicking on the Start Button then click on All Programs click on Accessories, then choose Windows Mobility Center on the list. You can perform a quick search for “windows mobility center” on the start search also.
The first icon in windows mobility center is display brightness, and is useful for adjusting the brightness of your laptop monitor, clicking once on the icon will bring this windows up:
I have setup this laptop for a power saver plan, which will turn off the display after 3 minutes the laptop is idle, and it will go into sleep mode after 15 minutes the system remains idle. I have basically lower completely down the brightness of the monitor to conserve power. now, when the laptop is plugged in I have set it up to turn off the display in 20 minutes the computer is idle and go into sleep mode after an hour if the system remains idle.
You can select the power plans by clicking on the blue URL at the bottom that says: Change advanced power settings: this window will pop-up:
From this window you can change the settings you want for your portable laptop. if you want your laptop to last longer when running on battery I recommend using the power saver plan, which will reduce the consumption of power on your system devices to preserve the juice.
Also, you can go over all the settings and create a custom plan. but most importantly, reduce the brightness of the monitor, and make the system to turn off the disk and go to sleep when not being used, that will preserve the juice the most.
The next icon on Windows Mobility Center is the audio icon. audio has actually been revamped in windows vista. no wait, let me say that again, Audio has been REWRITTEN in windows vista. the audio stack in windows vista has been completely rewritten, so now you can have control of things like per app audio control:
As you can see in the image above, you have total control of the app you want to have audio on. I don’t want to get too technical here, but surely I’m getting excited, according to Steve Ball-the GPM for the mediatech group which work on the window audio project (watch the video here) the biggest changes they made on the windows vista audio were:
The first (and biggest) change we made was to move the entire audio stack out of the kernel and into user mode. Pre-Vista, the audio stack lived in a bunch of different kernel mode device drivers, including sysaudio.sys, kmixer.sys, wdmaud.sys, redbook.sys, etc. In Vista and beyond, the only kernel mode drivers for audio are the actual audio drivers (and portcls.sys, the high level audio port driver).
The second biggest change is:
The second major change we made was a totally revamped UI for audio. Sndvol32 and mmsys.cpl were completely rewritten (from scratch) to include new, higher quality visuals, and to focus on the common tasks that users actually need to do. All the old functionality is still there, but for the most part, it’s been buried deep below the UI.
Have I astray from Windows Mobility Center topic? If I did, please pardon me, I get excited about these stuff. Let’s get back to Windows Mobility Center topic, nay, this post is getting too long and we haven’t even cover the second option on windows mobility center, I will rather break this post in a mini series posts.
In the next post I will review the audio part on windows mobility center.
Long time viewer / first time poster. Really enjoy reading the blog, keep up the excellent work. Will most definitely start posting more in the near future.