Notebook Hardware Control (NHC) as a Power4Gear alternative, finally a slick solution

Notebook Hardware Control (NHC) as a Power4Gear alternative, finally a slick solution!

My Asus W3V laptop is about a year old now, and I can confidently say it is one of the best computer purchases I have ever made. The only thing that I have been disappointed in is the Power4Gear utility that is included to switch power modes via the hot key on the side. The program looks like it was written for Windows 3.1, and it never quite worked right for me. From the beginning I had NHC (Notebook Hardware control) installed to take care of the CPU switching, and I was basically using Power4Gear as a monitor brightness switcher. For the last year I have been looking for a way to make that button better, and I finally found it!



What you will need:
-A Registered copy of Notebook Hardware Control V2.0 (link)
(Requires MS’s .Net Framework 2.0)
-bklynkid’s HControl replacement file and registry entry zip file (link)
-the latest version of Asus’s ATK0100 driver (link)
- You may or may not need the Asus ACPI controls (link) *place in C:\Program Files\Notebook Hardware Control\acpi directory, overwriting existing files*

Install the latest Asus driver first, then copy the HControl.exe replacement into the C:\WINDOWS\ATK0100\ directory on top of the existing HControl.exe. The new one should be smaller (I think?) by 20kb or so.

Next, install the latest version of NHC. I am pretty sure you need version 2.0, because I had been messing with 1. something and never got it working. To get it to do all of the functionality of BatteryLife.exe (I.E. Power4Gear) you need the registered version (to enable profiles). It’s like $15, and please don’t ask if there is a way to unlock profiles with out registering.

Ok, assuming that you have registered NHC, the profile selections under the Settings tab will be unlocked. Click the edit button. This will bring you into a list of profiles. To keep it similar to Power4Gear, I kept the Standard, High Performance, and Max Battery profiles, but added Cinema, Game, and Quiet Office modes.

Now if you go back to the Settings tab after pressing Ok, you will be able to select the profiles that you made. Check out the ones that were there first (Ex. Standard, vs Max Battery) to get an idea for how it works. Basically, any setting that you change while a profile is selected will stay selected when you switch back to that profile. This is where NHC gives you versatility that P4G never had… You can set CPU performance (not only does it actually work now, but it also can go into Dynamic switching, and even custom dynamic switching) video performance, monitor brightness (not only 1 brightness per profile, but brightness at full battery, medium battery, and low battery) and many other things. If anyone needs help with profile settings, I can post up my settings.xml file just to give you a starting point.

Okay, now for most of you, what I’ve said above won’t be anything different or new. But there is more. With any standard windows keymapper, the side (or front or top) buttons, or hotkeys, are totally inaccessible, due to the fact that Asus wrote their own interface (ATK0100) instead of piggybacking them on the keyboard. However, with the new HControl.exe file, the button actions are stored in the registry. By default, it shouldn’t do anything different when it is installed (except maybe launch WMP instead of Asus DVD when you press “Play”).

However, if BatteryLife.exe is not running when you press the performance mode hotkey, it looks in the registry for an alternative action. By default it is set to open task manager (I think). But if you open up regedit, and navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > ASUS > HControl > P4G-Button

and change the (default) key to

“C:\Program Files\Notebook Hardware Control\nhcmsg.exe –ps”

then disable startup of or remove P4G, when you hit the Performance Mode button, the NHC OSD should show up and it should cycle through the different profiles!

Now this interface looks 1000x better then P4G, is more customizable, and actually works! I hope someone finds this information useful, and I apologize in advance for being long winded . – Theshadow27

Note: If you don’t want to register, you can still get it working, it just will lack the versatility of the full version. If you want to try it, substitute “nhcmsg.exe –ps” with “nhcmsg.exe –cs” in the registry entry. This will cycle through the CPU speeds instead of profiles, but it wont change things like LCD brightness, or GPU power.