Power management drivers... are they necessary?

[stallen]

For anyone that has done a clean install (or if you know the answer)...

Does Vista have something built-in for power management for laptops? Do you really need the Lenovo power management driver and utility? Just for kicks I went to the dell.com drivers page. I didn't see any power management driver on their list.

I think their could be a problem with the new energy star driver/utility.

Someone on the NBR forum is having trouble with Vista 64-bit and the CPU doesn't seem to throttle up. Details here if you want: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=144544

Any comments would be appreciated.

BTW, the laptop in question is a T61

[sugo]

To get the best battery life you need the Lenovo PM driver.

[rukiri]

Yes, Vista has built-in power management for laptops.

Personally, I do not use the power manager. Vista lets you do everything the PM software does, while not slowing down your boot up time and adding an imho redundant program to your comp.

I will say, though, that the PM software is much easier to use than Vista if you want to really customize how your computer behaves. While the PM software spreads options out on a page, Vista for some reason i can not fathom makes you scroll through a multi-tree menu via a small non-resizable window. All the options are there, doing everything you can with PM, just.. in a harder to use or understand manner...

again, IMHO though, you're only setting it up once, so why install a program that will let me configure something more easily once? I'd rather spend the extra 3 minutes and spare my computer another random program i'll never use.


edit:
the PM *driver* as far as I know, just enables the F keys. At least, that's what the driver description says.. anyone know better?