I previously blogged about MiserWare, a company making software to save money. Well previously you could only get the Linux version (which for me is great) but now they’ve extended the beta to Windows. They’ve also added an (unnecessary but fun) GUI to the Windows version.
If you have any Windows machines (desktops as well as laptops) then maybe you want to take this for a test drive. Click the image above to join the beta and get the software for free.
Note: I may get a reward if enough people sign up. If you know other people who run Windows, then you too can get rewards if you refer them!
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Looks like interesting software, but the EULA seems pretty hefty.
Yeah, they’ve been criticised for that in the past. As I understand it the very cool developer guys are somewhat constrained by the less-cool lawyer types.
I tried it out, and I don’t see any measurable difference compared to the ondemand scheduler (Intel Core 2 dual-core processor). I know it uses more than just the maximum and minimum clock speeds, unlike ondemand, but I don’t see any practical difference.
Maybe it’s designed more for for AMD processors. I have no idea what their status is in terms of power management.
I’ve been running Micromiser on Linux for a while (both on my Core 2 Duo laptop, and now my new Atom-based Asrock) and been impressed. However, I installed it this evening on my laptop (dual booting Windows 7 x74 and Ubuntu 9.10 x64 on the same box) and it actually seemed to make it worse.
The laptop seemed sluggish, the fan seemed to be going louder for longer, and Task Manager showed “svchost.exe” using ~50% CPU (so all of one core). Thanks to the new Services tab in Win7′s Task Manager I can tie that particular instance of svchost.exe to which services it was actually running, which was “Power”, “Plug and Play” and “DCOMLaunch”. After quitting Micromiser, no sign of these issues.
I intend to have a better look at all this later this week when I have a bit more time at work and submit anything I find to Miserware to help them improve it, but it seems that currently on certain hardware it may actually make your experience (and battery life) worse due to the extra fan speed and sluggishness while you’re trying to use your computer…
Would be quite interesting to have this UI added to the Mac and Linux versions too.
I can’t imagine it would be hard to do..
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[...] Pope: MiserWare Beta for Windows as well as Linux. You may have heard about this very nice software title for helping you save money on your electric [...]