Turn off back-light and keep it off? Disable HTT?

I've got two questions.

(1) I discovered one sunny day that I could use the laptop with the back-lighting off and still see the screen with more than adequate legibility. I pressed fn + F6 and saw that I could still read the page I opened. Then I went to the next page and the back-lighting came back on.

How do I disable the back-lighting without it being sensitive to keyboard or trackpad movements. I found this program to do it generically, but it turns the entire LCD off, and not just the backlight [http://www.redmondpie.com/turn-off-your-notebook-lcd-with-one-click/]. Also, the dev used keyboard and mouse movements as the trigger for turning it back on. I would want one with a keybinding, such as fn + Shift + F6.

Here's a picture of what kind of legibility I get http://img223.imageshack.us/img223/8113/0003kq4.jpg. You can understand why I would want to be able to keep the light off from the picture (NOTE: not on the lowest setting, the light is completely off). Think about the battery life!

(2) Another problem I have is with being unable to disable HTT (read: it's inaccessible in the BIOS). I know that the chipset uses significantly more battery life than the CPU, but if I could squeeze just another 10-20 minutes out of it, I'd be able to finish up an entire day's worth of lectures with a second to spare. In class, I only run Acrobat to read .pdfs of my text books, so I really don't need multi-tasking. I'm sure my battery life would increase if I could somehow turn off HTT. Is here a recommended hacked BIOS by any Aspire One modders? I don't want to deal with reinstalling Windows in order to replace the HAL file with a single-core flavor.

 

if your using linpus compile the kernel without SMP (symetric multi processing) ability then it will only ever see one core instead of two