Sunday, March 15, 2015

Enhancing Toshiba Eco Utility

Some days ago, I made the first commits of a new script of mine.
I bought a Toshiba laptop, and found that the program "Toshiba Eco Utility" (for Windows only) allows one to choose an option called "Peak Shift". This allows you to reduce energy consumption when the energy costs more, by relying on the battery.
This is handy, but it is not practical to configure in details. It supports only 4 time spans, it does not support some"intelligent" rule like "every Saturday and Sunday, including national holidays".

So, I wrote this small ruby script to support some more option. The script does not actually modify the settings: instead, it produces a .reg file. This .reg file must be imported via regedit.exe (double clicking on the file and saying "yes" is enough), but then the "Peak shift" settings are just fine.

It does not overcome the 4 periods limitations... it seems like it is not overridable at all. You have to run this about once in a month in order for the settings to be perfectly suited to the current month.
In the next days I'll enrich this post with further details, and I'll improve the script a little... in the meanwhile if you want to try, go to https://github.com/cvicari/teco_autosettings