While the PSP's a handy portable system to have around, one major problem that's plagued it since day one is its chronically short battery life. Buying longer-lasting batteries go a long way to alleviate this, but in the end, the best way to preserve the PSP's run time is for us to be efficient in using it.

If you're particularly keen on conserving your PSP's power, you may want to check out this plugin that developer Torch released over at the QJ.NET Forums. It's dubbed Hold+ v1.0 and basically allows your PSP to do the following things when you click on its Hold switch. Here's a list of its features, quoting the readme:

• Switches off the LCD backlight.
• Switches off the actual LCD screen. (This is important because the backlight and actual screen are two different things. You can have an image being displayed on the screen while the backlight is switched off, such that you can see the image if you use a flashlight. You can also have the screen switched off while the backlight still illuminates the powered off screen.)
• Underclocks the CPU to 61MHz (Sony has changed the clock speed functions such that only certain combinations of speeds work correctly. Simply trying to underclock to arbitrary values will result in the CPU simply running at the stock speed. I have verified that Hold+ successfully underclocks to 61MHz.)
• The original screen brightness and clock speed are restored when the Hold switch is released.
  

Further details on installing this homebrew plugin are available in the file bundle's readme. You may also want to visit Torch's release thread at the QJ.NET PSP Development Forum is you're interested in leaving your feedback.

Download: Hold+ v1.0
Visit: QJ.NET PSP Development Forum