Laptops :: A ton of questions from a noob

Laptop Specific:
...- Is there another way to view battery power remaining?...

There are some things you can do to be able to view battery power etc.

What you do depends on whether your laptop follows the old APM (advanced power management) or the newer APCI (advanced power control interface) standard. I have been trying to get my laptop working with ACPI (you can see the details using the forum search function) so I don't know anything about APM.

As far as I can tell, DSL 1.5 does not support ACPI but DSL 2.0RC1 does. I have managed to manually load the ACPI modules and the myDSL wmapci dock app works fine, you can also manually slow your cpu down

original here.