How to Save Your Laptop Battery For Long Life

FlashFrozen maybe the answer to your short battery life. If you use Google Chrome, Firefox 4, and in Safari on 64-bit Macs, the Flash plug-in is pushed onto its own process. FlashFrozen lives as a tiny menu app, monitoring this process and will warn you (by turning red) if Flash is using a relatively significant amount of processor cycles. You can then go to FlashFrozen's menu to kill the Flash plug-in.

Any running Flash content is replaced with the broken plugin icon. Want to get Flash working again? Simply reload the page, or go to a new one. The next time Flash is needed, it'll come back to life. Flash ads or other Flash-related junk forces our processors to run hot and leech our precious battery fluids.

Flash animations and videos are among the top processor hogs on Mac OS X. A single poorly-designed Flash banner - even in an inactive window or tab - can suck up an entire processor core with its shady mortgage offers.

Your 5-hour battery life gets cut in half, your laptop runs hotter, and your legs cook to medium-rare.

That's where FlashFrozen comes into play.

FlashFrozen lets you stop the Flash plug-in dead in its tracks, letting your new-fangled Mac cool down, use less power, and give you more time to do whatever it is you do. Probably blog or tweet or something.

And the new AutoKill mode actively stops Flash at all times. Turn this on and off at will to save even more battery life.