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.