All modern processors have built-in power management features that allow you to lower the costs of your power bills. For their latest processors, AMD developed a technology called Cool'n'Quiet and Intel another one called SpeedStep. Both of them dynamically adjust the voltage and the core frequency of your processor, decreasing the average power consumption and average heat production.

Our systems are based on AMD processors and, after we installed Windows Vista, we tried to find Cool'n'Quiet drivers for it. We were surprised to see that there are none available on the AMD site. That's because Windows Vista has built-in power management features that do no require additional drivers.

To enable these features you must create or select an appropriate power plan. Just follow these steps:

Go to Control Panel and type the word "power" in the search box.

Click on Change power-saving settings.

Now you have the option to select the power plan you prefer from the default list or create a new one. In order to take advantage of the power management features of your system the Balanced and Power saver plans are good options. If you select High performance, Cool'n'Quiet or SpeedStep will be disabled.

If you are the type that prefers to customize his operating system to the very last detail, you could create your own power plan. To do that, click on the Create a power plan button.

Choose a standard plan as a base for the one you create and then type a name for it. Click Next.

First select when to turn off the display and when to put the computer to sleep. After that, click on the Create button.

After the plan is created you will be redirected to the Select a power plan window. Under the name of your newly created plan you will see a Change plan settings link. Click on it and then click on Change advanced power settings. Then, the Advanced settings window will open.

In this window you have the possibility to make advanced changes to your power plan. To take advantage of the power saving features offered by your processor, go to Processor power management. Here you can set the minimum and maximum states of your processor. Depending on the system load, your processor frequency and voltage will fluctuate according to these settings.

TIPS: If you don't see the Processor power management option and your processor supports this feature, try the following:

• download the latest Windows Vista drivers for your motherboard;
• check if the Cool'n'Quiet or SpeedStep feature is enabled in the BIOS of your motherboard;
• check if there are any BIOS updates available and install them. Many of our readers reported that a BIOS update resolved their problems.

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