One of the really nice things that Microsoft added to Vista was three different power plans, and also provided the ability to create your own if you so desire. By default the operating system ships with a power saver, balanced, and high performance plan. I can really attest to the power saver plan squeezing every bit of juice out of your battery, but most people will likely never switch out of the “balanced” plan that Microsoft has set as the default.
Naturally you would expect performance to suffer when using the balanced plan when compared to the high performance plan. After all, the balanced plan is more friendly on your pocketbook and the environment. Interestingly enough that’s not turning out to be the case according to some recent CrystalMark benchmarks by PocketTables (here and here).
What they found was that Vista’s balanced power plan beat out high performance on two different machines that they tested. You would expect it to be pretty darn close since the balanced plan is supposed to kick up performance when it’s needed, but to flat-out beat the high performance plan in nearly every test is just crazy.
If you’ve been using the high performance power plan maybe it’s time you kick it “down” to the balanced option. 
[via jkOnTheRun]
I was having horrible battery life, even on power saver, on my XPS1330. I knew it wasn’t Vista as I had ran Vista with great battery life on an older Dell laptop.
After a couple months of just figuring my new notebook was a power hog, I did some testing and found out it was because I was using 802.11n.
When I switched to 802.11g or 802.11b, my battery life was great, even under balanced.
I guess Intel’s first ABGN chip isnt very well optimized for 802.11n yet.
That’s really interesting… I would have never guessed that 802.11n would take up so much extra power.
I liked the High Performance plan because of the brightness and I thought that it made my laptop faster but now I am switching back to Balanced and going to change the brightness level higher- but it won’t make it the same as High Performance, will it?
No, the high performance plan adjusts things other than just the brightness. For example, it throttles your CPU speed so that it only runs at full speed when it’s really needed.
No kidding….My laptop was experiencing heating issues when I was running the high performance profile….after reading this article, I switched to balanced profile and my laptop is doing great. The laptop was running at 75° C (60°C in idle status) in high performance…..with all the same applications running (in balanced profile) the temperature dropped between 61° and 65°C(53°C in idle status). I also checked the voltage….in high performance the CPU was receiving maximium voltage of 1.34, however with balanced profile active the voltage was being throttled between 1.06 and 1.34 based on usage. Heat issues have gone and the laptop performance is even better and that’s because the high performance profile was feeding the processor full voltage constantly, resulting in heat generation….balanced profile was throttling the voltage ensuring better performance and reduced heat generation. Remember higher temperature’s = reduced performance and vice versa.