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The following is a repost from WMExperts and details how to get the most out of your Windows Mobile battery life.

No matter how big the battery on your phone, you’ll always want to get a little more life out of it. Lately many phones - especially Windows Mobile phones - have been shaving their batteries down to achieve better form factors. So this guide, Part IV in the series (the rest are here), will tell you the tips and tricks you need to know to max out the battery life on your Windows Mobile smartphone.

The following may sound like a obvious statement, but it is important to have this line of thought when optimizing your phone to save battery power: In order to increase your battery life you need to decrease the power used. There are many things you can do to decrease the power used. Some of the steps may be changing the default settings, including possibly tweaking the registry of your phone, while others may included adapting some of your habits while using your phone.

The first step in increasing your battery life is to identify the most common sources of battery drain and take steps to minimize their impact on the life of your battery per charge. When I am talking about battery drain or conservation issues, there are a lot of little things you can do that make a HUGE difference. My goal is to provide the most comprehensive list of battery saving tips you have seen in one place before. Now lets start looking at these power hungry culprits that will suck the life right out of your battery and the steps we all need to take to limit the drain on our battery as much as possible. I have divided this up into 4 sections including Connections, Usage Habits, Tools, and Advanced.

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I’m a customizer. I love Windowsblinds, I’ve used all kinds of sidebar applications like SysMetrix, Desktop Sidebar, etc. When I first heard about Vista including a side bar I was pretty excited… then I loaded some system monitoring gadgets and it all went downhill. Perhaps it’s the fault of the gadget creators themselves and not Vista Sidebar, but that thing ate up some serious resources. My laptop is getting older (Dell XPS Gen2, 2.0Ghz, 2g RAM) so for the longest time I didn’t bother running the sidebar. After some discussions with a co-worker I decided to play with it again and loaded it up with some gadgets. Suddenly, it wouldn’t load or it would load but there would be no gadgets and Task Manager would report it continually gobbling up memory. I have no idea if it was a specific gadget that caused the problem I just knew I wanted it fixed.

The Sidebar Properties window has an option to restore the default Vista gadgets, but it was greyed out. No love there.

Unable to use the default method for restoring the defaults I set out to try and fix it manually. Here’s the steps I took:

1. Open task manager and kill any sidebar.exe process that might be running.
2. Open Explorer and browse to C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar (where <user name> is the user you log into Vista with).
3. Open Settings.ini, hit CTRL-A (select all) and hit delete. The file is now empty. Save the file.
4. Browse into the Gadgets directory.
5. Select CTRL-A (select all) and delete them. (Note: I couldn’t delete ALL of the gadgets the first try. If that happens reboot and try to delete them again… after the reboot you should be able to delete them all).
6. Restart Windows Sidebar.

Everything should load successfully now. You should see the default Sidebar with the clock, wallpaper thingy, and RSS feed. For some odd reason the “restore defaults” button is still greyed out… go figure.

Now that it’s back will I give Sidebar another shot? Probably. I love to tweak my system and I can think of a few gadgets I’d love to have always on access to… I’ll probably still shy away from the resource meters as I suspect they were causing the excess cpu cycles.

Windows task manager has finally received a much needed make over. Something that’s always irked me was that I’d see these processes but not necessarily know where they are running from. In Vista you can customize the processes tab. The easiest way to open task manager is to right-click anywhere on your task bar (or the clock) and select Task Manager from the popup. When task manager pops up, select the Processes tab. You’ll see a list of running applications, the user they are running under etc. With Vista you can add some additional useful info. At the top of the window select View -> Select Colums. When presented with the list select Image Path Name and Command Line and you’ll now see where your processes are executing. The screenshot below shows an example of what it will look like after you’ve made the change (click the thumbnail for a full screen image).