Control laptop settings (and save battery life) with Windows Mobility Center

The Mobility Center is not new—it was introduced with Windows Vista—but it’s not particularly well-known, and it’s worth revisiting for the XP faithful and those who only used Vista on a desktop PC. Mobility Center is a standard “dashboard”-type panel for laptops that summarizes crucial info about your portable. It’s back in Windows 7, and it allows you to make changes to your laptop’s battery-consumption schemes in a jiffy, making it easier for you to conserve runtime.

The easiest way to access Mobility Center on your notebook is to hold down the Windows key and press X. You can also do a quick desktop search for “Windows Mobility Center.”

The Mobility Center lets you see a display-brightness slider, a volume control, remaining battery life and power settings, and wireless connectivity status all at once. (All of these settings, to some degree, affect how long your system will last on the battery.) In the next row, you see Screen Orientation, which lets you rotate the LCD image; External Display, which makes connecting to a second screen easy; and Sync Settings, which lets you add new devices and control your syncing settings. Depending on your particular PC model, you may see more or fewer tiles, but this is the basic setup. Here's how it looks:

Note that Mobility Center appears only on notebooks and tablets. If you’d like to experiment with it on your desktop, you need to first download the file Enable_Desktop_WMC.zip, save it, unzip it, and open it. This will tweak your Registry. Then, do a desktop search for mblctr.exe from the Start menu to launch it. It’s not as smooth as with notebooks, and doesn't deliver all of the same info, but it will get the job done for desktop users. (Note that if you want to keep it around, you can right-click on the search result to pin it to the Start menu or taskbar.)