I recently lost the hard drive on my laptop. After getting a new drive, I thought I'd install XP Pro (it came with Home) and do a nice clean installation instead of dealing with all the utter crap that came with the computer originally.

I've got everything up and running except for one thing. I can't get the PowerPanel utility to work right. Sony's installation for that simply doesn't work. I wasted $20 to get them to tell me, essentially, "despite the fact that we give instructions on how to do exactly what you're doing, we don't care if it works or not". So, can anyone suggest maybe a third-party ACPI utility that would work in its stead. Surely it's fairly standard. The way it is now, I can barely get 30 minutes of battery life because it keeps the display and CPU turned up all the way.

The sad part is that I was able to copy the original utility off of the bad drive, and it sorta-kinda looks like it works, but then it just doesn't.

Okay, nevermind. I was able to extract the power utility installer from Sony's stupid set installer which was deciding not to do the installation for some reason. Anyway, I installed it that way and everything seems to be good except that it won't control the backlight level. It'll do on and off, but not dim to bright. If anyone has any ideas about that, I'd love to hear them.

Totally different brand, but my Dell works just like the empeg does. It knows whether AC power is connected and just sets the backlight brightness to what the user previously set manually. i.e. it's possible to have the backlight brighter on battery than when on AC.

So unplug it and adjust the brightness using "Fn+XXX" keys with it running off battery.

I think on the Dell it's also in the BIOS but there's no need for you to enter the BIOS to adjust it though.