I upgraded my Tablet PC to Vista Ultimate over the weekend and installed the new DreamScene Ultimate Extra. If you don't know, this extra allows movie clips to be played on the desktop which is very cool for very sublte movements. The preview version includes the aura backgroud with moving lights. There should be a lot more movies coming when DreamScene moves beyond "preview". You can also apply your own short movie clips to it as well.

I was pleased to find that once I went mobile using my battery, DreamScene automatically detected the change and paused the movie, thus saving CPU cycles which helps stay on top of battery performance. There is also a new DreamScene option in the Vista Power Plan that will allow you modify that setting. It defaults to Balanced, which pauses the movie. I modified my setting to Power Saver, which I'm not sure what value that adds at this point.

With folks experiencing 15% - 30% battery performance drops since moving to Vista, it is good to see mobile aware applications like this begin to take shape. I'm currently playing around with various settings (CPU, Search and Indexing, Brightness, etc) to see what tolerance I can take when on battery.