Update boosting netbook battery life

Scattered reports indicate the the latest update to Leopard is giving a serious boost to the battery life of "hackintoshed" netbooks. It could be an indicator that Apple has something similar up its sleeve.

A number of non-Apple netbook users that have installed Mac OS X on their systems are reporting that the  recent update to 10.5.7 for Leopard has brought significant improvements to the diminutive mobile computers. A bunch of people running a hackintoshed Dell Mini 9 or MSI Wind are reporting an extra hour of battery life with 10.5.7 over 10.5.6.

Currently, there appears to be no known cause of the improvement, as AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext is generally disabled on hackintoshed netbooks to eliminate crashing associated with that kernel extension.

Since the phenomenon appears to be limited to Atom-based netbooks this could be an indicator that Apple may yet have a product that's smaller than a notebook but bigger than an iPhone up its sleeve.