Filed under: OS Updates, Utilities, Windows, Microsoft, Freeware
Get better battery life under XP
by Jason Clarke Jul 14th 2006
If, like me, you run a Windows XP-based laptop and wonder why your battery life doesn't seem to be as good as it ought to be, or as it used to be, it could be that you lost some battery life when updating to Windows XP SP2. It turns out that there's a bug that can cause XP to leave your USB2 ports powered even when they don't need to be, which forces the operating system to not drop into the proper ACPI processor idle sleep state. Now there's no guarantee that installing this hot-fix from Microsoft will increase your battery life, since they don't provide any sort of mechanism to see whether or not your setup is affected by this bug. But if you suspect you're not getting the kind of battery life you should be, it's probably worth giving the hot-fix a try.
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
