PowerChanger

Laptops are now fitted with powerful hardware components and are preferred by many because of the possibility to use on the go. Sure enough everything running on it takes up a bit of battery power, but you can use specialized applications like PowerChanger to quickly switch to a different power plan and squeeze a little more energy to finish your projects.

On the one hand, the application saves you all the effort of going through a setup process, which means it can be stored along with an entire collection of system tools on a thumb drive to always have at hand. You just need to make sure that the computer you want to use it on is fitted with .NET Framework.

From start to end, the application only takes a few seconds of your time. This is because selecting the power plan of interest and applying it makes the application close. A neat tweak is to have a hotkey assigned to the program’s shortcut from the Properties panel to always launch it at the press of a button without having to explore different directories.

The main window shows up in a compact form, which can make it rather difficult to identify power schemes, especially if they’re fitted with long names. What’s more, compatibility issues might prevent it from properly reading names, which makes it close to impossible to tell which is which from the placeholder code entries used instead.

Power schemes are applied on the spot so you don’t need to restart your system. Unfortunately, you can get a preview of power schemes, and changing them needs to be done through other means. It would have also been useful to at least see a quick access link to the Windows power schemes management panel.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that PowerChanger is a little underprepared for what it wants to deliver. The visual design is rather poor, with limited view space, while power scheme identification doesn’t always work as planned.