Improving Laptop Battery Life

With our laptop battery tips your battery may not only last longer between charges, but may also last longer period, which is a good thing as laptop batteries can be very expensive to replace.

Improving laptop battery life with Windows power saving
Windows has some very good power saving options, these can be accessed from Start Menu > Control Panel > Power Options – all of these settings are flexible, so change them to suit your working needs, and create your own custom profile.



 

The Windows Power Options Screen

Plugged in Devices
Remove plugged in devices such as pen drives, external hard drives, all of these can take a heavy toll on the battery consumption.

Defragmenting
The less your computer has to access the hard drive the better, keep your hard drives fragmentation to a minimum will not only help in improving laptop battery life , but it will also make your laptop faster and more resilient,

More on defragmenting your hard drive

Hard Drives
Consider replacing your laptops current hard drive with an SSD or Solid State disk. With no moving parts it gives faster bootup times, faster access times and is much more durable. More here on Solid State Drives

Screen Brightness
The laptops screen is the biggest drain on the battery, turning down the brightness to a comfortable setting will mean extra mobile time.

Turn off unused components
Every single active component in your laptop requires power, switching off or disabling unneeded hardware such as WIFI cards, modems, PCMCIA, Fire wire or serial ports can have a big effect on battery conservation

Charge the battery often (only Nickel type)
Always charge the battery as soon as you can, never let it run down more than necessary, the more its discharged the quicker its ability to hold a charge will decrease

Nickel based batteries
With this older type of battery they can develop a memory, in effect the battery may look fully charged and will be ok for a while and then may quickly die as the memory gives a false indication of the true charge state, so fully discharge and recharge every month to eliminate the risks of battery memory

Add more RAM
The more the merrier, adding more RAM means your laptop has to use the Windows swap files on the hard drive less due to the increase memory, More on adding RAM

Disable scheduled tasks
If your working on battery power the last thing you need is a scheduled task such as an antivirus scan running in the back ground which will in effect scan the whole of your hard drive, and if you have a large hard drive this could take a while and lots of battery power

Only open applications or files you need to use
The simple rule here is, the more you have open the more memory will be used and the more the page file will use the hard drive

Use hibernation mode
Powering on a laptop uses every part of the laptops software and hardware at one stage or another, by using hibernation mode it will take a snap shot of the computer before hibernating and then opens up the snapshot when powered back on, the time to bring a laptop back from hibernation as opposed to a full power on is much faster which means less resources are used, you can also leave applications open and it will bring you back to the same working state.

Keep the laptop cool
If the laptop starts to get warm, of course it will attempt to cool itself switching on its fan or fans, so by making sure all of it’s ventilation ports are clear of dirt, dust, and making sure there is a space under and to the sides of the laptop will help ensure its kept as cool as possible. For more keeping your laptop cool

CD/DVD Drives
If you have any files on CD/DVD copy them to the hard drive or USB pen drive before working from the battery, hard drives and USB pen drives consume far less power than CD/DVD drives

Don’t multitask
Flicking between applications not only means loading more from the hard drive, but it also puts more of a load on the processor, modern processors are very good at saving power by only using the required amount of power, but throw too much at it and it will consume large amounts of power.

BIOS power saving
Usually in the BIOS settings of most laptop there is a power saving section, from here components can be disabled before Windows even loads

Keep your hard disk clean and tidy
A hard drive that’s not tidy means it can take a while to find files, not only this if it’s untidy the chances are it will need defragmenting, and if disk space is below 15% there may not be space to run the defragmenting utility

Lower Windows graphic options
The more graphics options we have switched on the more system resources such as system and video RAM are required, did you know switching off some of the graphics options will free up system resources, Resulting in a faster system

Laptop battery maximizing software
Many laptops come with there own power saving software for improving laptop battery life , make the most of this as it usually offers more options to help with battery life such as slowing down the processor or optimizing the whole system for better battery life

Long life alternative batteries
There are a lot of ways of improving laptop battery life , but its not infinite, if your looking to run on battery power for very long periods the only way is to invest in another battery, but check around to see if you laptop manufacturer has a heavy duty alternative, it may cost a little more, but it could double the current battery time between charges.

Improving laptop battery life can also benefit from
Resetting the battery read more from our Laptop battery problems page

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