BatteryCare allows you to have the control over the discharge cycles number, and when this reaches 30 (or other configured value), it notifies you that it’s time to perform a full discharge in order to keep the battery gauge calibrated. Like this, it’s guaranteed to always have the correct capacity values reported by the battery. 

Besides, when using the battery, there’s the possibility to suspend some Operating System features that help degrading the autonomy (only in Windows Vista or higher):

Windows Aero, the theme that allows for visual effects like window transparency, requires graphics card acceleration, which obviously will help decreasing the battery lifetime;

SuperFetch, ReadyBoost and SearchIndexer are three Windows Vista (and higher) services that, even in battery mode, are using the hard disk a lot and increase total power consumption, thus decreasing battery lifetime. Suspending these services has absolutely no negative impact on the performance or security of the system.

These features are resumed once the laptop is plugged in to A/C power.

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