Vista "power-saving" Profile Disables the Aero Interface

The "power-saving" profile disables the Aero interface in Windows Vista.

It's mainly because the Aero interface (yeah the new 'cool' one) is eating up the battery time. Draining your battery like a leech. Sucking out the battery, sorry.

The Aero interface is automatically disabled when a user puts their Vista notebook into the "power-saving" profile, one of three new simplified power management states. While that makes for an arguably duller experience, Microsoft said it commissioned a study (click here for PDF) that found no difference in "responsiveness," or application load time, between a notebook with Aero disabled versus one running the fancy graphics: implying that Aero doesn't put too much of a load on the system.But the notebook and Tablet PC used in Principled Technologies' test had the power management setting on "high-performance" when testing Aero's performance. At that setting, the notebook won't ever compromise performance to preserve battery life, so responsiveness isn't an issue.

Microsoft, for its part, will likely have to improve Vista's battery life performance over time through the release of service packs and other tweaks.