I was surprised to find out that there are no applications, apparently, that will allow you to execute an application, or perform some task, when transitioning from AC to DC (battery).  You see, I want to kill off extraneous processes when I switch to battery in order to conserve power.  When I'm back on AC, I want to restart them (potentially).

Now, there are ways to script this, but I need a low-profile, always-on, app running in the background waiting for a power broadcast (PowerModeChangedEvent).  Since I don't want to introduce more CPU overhead through a script, I opted to write a quick application to do what I wanted.

It's a really simple polling application that will execute actions based on an XML configuration file.  It can be easily extended to do other things; I just needed to knock this out real quick.

This project is now hosted on CodePlex.  You can get BatterySaver from here.

WTF?

The machine was up for 10 days and the mozybackup service had consumed half of my available RAM.  Restarting the service released the RAM, as expected, but that seems a bit extreme.

In all fairness, I was 3 patch-releases behind, though there's no auto-update feature or notification in Mozy (yet?).  I upgraded to the latest version and will keep an eye on it.  Since Mozy doesn't post release notes or a changelog, I can only hope for the best.

EDIT: Updating to the latest version solved the problem.  The mozybackup process is appropriately consuming 33MB after 14 days uptime.

You really shouldn't ask this of a user of a website.  First, I don't expect to have to wait 5-7 minutes. Second, you're asking me to careful not to close your tab which is pretty much unusable.  Why not just say, "We'll email you when your account has been provisioned"?

I wanted to create a list of the free (mostly) utilities that I use on a regular basis.  I've found that a lot of people don't seek out tools to make their lives easier.. strange.  This is not an exhaustive list, but it's a start.

Link Shell Extension
Create hard and symbolic links in windows
http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext.html

Notepad++
Great general-purpose text editor
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/

FastStone Capture *
One of the best screen capture apps out there. Simple and effective.
http://www.faststone.org

7zip
Best compression tool available
http://www.7-zip.org/download.html

Ditto
Great tool for keeping a clipboard history. Great for refactoring.
http://ditto-cp.sourceforge.net/

Virtual Clone Drive
Nice free ISO mounter - works in Windows 7
http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html

XPath Visualizer
Nice tool for testing XPath expressions without the bloat of larger multiple-purpose XML tools
http://xpathvisualizer.codeplex.com/

XML Explorer
Nice light-weight tool for working with XML
http://xmlexplorer.codeplex.com/

SyncBackSE *
Great tool for filesystem synchronization, there is a free version
http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html

GrepWin
Coming from a Unix world, I need my grep. Search and replace, fast.
http://tools.tortoisesvn.net/grepWin

Mozy Home
The only online backup service I trust. Currently hosting 300GB of my precious data.
http://mozy.com/

TortoiseSVN
The only SVN client for Windows that's worth mentioning.
http://tortoisesvn.net/

VisualSVN Server
Great SVN server that run as a Windows service. Takes the headache out of manual setup.
http://www.visualsvn.com/

Snippet Compiler
Great tool for testing expressions outside of an IDE
http://www.sliver.com/dotnet/SnippetCompiler/

Development Specific

LINQPad
Awesome LINQ tool and snippet compiler... awesome.
http://www.linqpad.net/

GhostDoc
Must-have tool for generating meaningful documentation stubs
http://submain.com/products/ghostdoc.aspx

Reflector
.Net assembly analyzer and disassembler
http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector/

ReSharper *
Must-have tool for refactoring. Version 5 looks stellar.
http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/

VisualSVN *
Must-have SVN integration with Visual Studio 2005+
http://www.visualsvn.com/

* - Not free but worth the purchase price.