Extend the life of laptop batteries
The real value, or nuisance value, of the factory set battery life like toshiba pa3356u-1bas profiles are the automatic shutdowns, In the aggressive battery such as toshiba satellite a65 battery saver modes, the hard drive spins down every time it’s not accessed for a minute or two, and the LCD winks out if you don’t hit a key or move the mouse every minute. While the LCD coming on and off can be annoying, it probably doesn’t waste extra power, but I believe that frequently spinning the hard drive up and down rather than just keeping it going can waste more power than it saves. Likewise, hibernate and standby can help conserve battery life e.g. toshiba a75 battery if you’re going to remain in that mode for a while, but going into hibernation every five minutes and having to wake up again is probably a wash, because hibernate is actually doing work saving an image of your desktop and then shutting down the power. When you power up again, the system is doing a lot of work to restore your desktop, as opposed to preserving it in a low power state. Standby does just that, extending battery life such as toshiba a65 battery by preserving everything in memory but shutting down all of the user interfaces. A laptop might be able to preserve it’s current state on standby for a day or two on a full charge, but it’s really for moving from the cafe back home, or between your office and a meeting.
