First sorry for my not so good english.
Hope it's good enough to let you know about a utility we've worked on to help saving battery life with your netbook.
A few weeks ago, on a french forum, we started asking ourselves about the way to cut the power of the devices that were not actually used on the S10, in the hope to improve the autonomy of the battery. One of us came out with devcon.exe, a utility by miscosoft to activate/deactivate the devices in the device manager using command lines. First we created batch files to reach the goal to extend the battery life, but then another one of us came discussing the point and created a little utility to manipulate the devices, and finally here we are with a stable version 1.2.2, including presets for several netbooks, and a working interface that can be completely programmed to your will.
What does it do? EkoBatt allows to deactivate or reactivate devices in two clicks : first you deactivate devices you don't actually use, saving battery life ; then comes the moment you need to use, say, the card reader : you launch EkoBatt, and you click the reactivation of the card reader. Here you go : you have the benefit of battery saving, without the hassle to have to go through winxp pages to reach the device manager.
How does it work? EkoBatt does the same as activating/deactivating devices in the device manager, by using devcon commands. All you have to do to add a device to EkoBatt, is to find the device ID inside the device manager's windows nomenclature, and to enter this as a parameter in one of the EkoBatt's buttons slots.
How to get started with EkoBatt? the best is that it comes with a regular installer, and a preset for the S10, and other netbooks. The way to go is to try it out, install, and see if your average battery life is better or not. Typically, if you're not using all the connections slots, all the devices at the same time, the battery life can be extended to up to 50% using EkoBatt, as you're cutting the power to the devices that are not in use right now. Remember that you're not sacrificing the use of these devices by doing so, as you can reactivate the devices in a few click any time : you're just turning off the lights in the rooms you're not sitting in atm.
Hope you'll enjoy EkoBatt. Don't hesitate to ask for help, as much as we can, we will help.
Feedback is also welcome
Together papertinsel, ritmicmusic & CerfVolant (the hero coder of EkoBatt)
I gave the program a try on my S10e with Windows7 - seams to work OK. Will have to try it for a longer period to actually notice any gain in battery time.
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Don't imagine we will translate to scandinavian (I wish I could be able to do it but...)