Have you ever wanted to quickly switch from High Performance to Power Saver mode to save some battery life? With a quick command line in a shortcut, you can do it with a keystroke.

Over at the How-To Geek site (my home away from Lifehacker), forum member Scott shares the quick-and-dirty method to create a shortcut for switching between power management plans—and once you have the shortcut you can assign a hotkey to switch on the fly. Simply create a shortcut to the following, substituting the name of the power management plan.
powercfg /setactive "Plan Name Here"

Once you've created the shortcut, you can assign a hotkey in the properties dialog—even better, put the shortcut in a location to be indexed by Launchy or the Vista start menu search, or even add it to your AutoHotkey automation script.

Hit the link for the full explanation, or check out a hidden Windows 7 tool that troubleshoots sleep mode problems, learn how to use a hotkey to turn off the monitor, or read up on some easy ways to go green with your computer.