PowPlan

Needless to say that laptops are the computers you can use literally anywhere. However, you need to make sure it’s got enough battery life to last for the duration of the activity you’re performing, and everything uses power, including the screen brightness. On the other hand, PowPlan can help you easily switch to a more efficient power plan directly from the system tray.

A neat thing about it is that it doesn’t need to be installed in order to function, meaning it’s as portable as the laptop you use it on, and can be easily carried around on a USB flash drive. System registries remain intact, thus not affecting the target PC’s health status in any way.

There’s no actual main window to work with, and this is because all the application has to offer is accessed from the corresponding tray area, where it spends all of its time. On mouseover, battery status and power left are shown, and the icon also changes accordingly. Clicking it lets you easily adjust screen brightness by moving a slider.

Right-clicking the tray icon is where all the fun happens. A small menu appears with all power options your computer is currently equipped with. In case you didn’t already know, Windows gives you the possibility to create and manage power plans, in order to efficiently use your laptop’s battery.

Selecting an option gets it applied immediately. There’s also the possibility to make the program run with Windows, for more comfort. Unfortunately, there’s no shortcut to the Windows Control Panel power options, nor the possibility to configure hotkeys for different plans. What’s more, it would have been useful to set a backup power plan to automatically switch to whenever power reached a specific limit.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that PowPlan comes with good intentions, letting you easily switch to a more efficient power plan in order to save some more battery power. However, the set of features it puts at your disposal is rather poor, with no hotkey support, nor a backup plan to automatically trigger.