Tips for Increase Laptop Battery Life

It’s no secret that as the usage of a laptop increases, its battery life diminishes. While there has been some development in the type of batteries, battery life is something which users continue to complain about. Obviously, the type of operating system has a lot to do with the battery performance. The newer operating systems, like Windows 7 are rich in graphics and hence consume more battery. This article talks about some useful tips and techniques to extend your Windows laptop’s battery life. Mind you, it does mean doing away with certain nice appearance related features. But if you are a performance freak, it shouldn’t bother you. The tips are written with Windows Vista/7 in mind but most of them are general techniques and should work in all kinds of laptops.

More the screen brightness, more the battery consumed by your laptop. To decrease it, click on the battery icon on the system tray and select “More power options”. Power options window will open, move the screen brightness (given at the bottom) slider to left. Note that  working with less screen brightness is also good for your eyes.

PC memory that is in-use takes more power to hold data. Also, using more memory might mean using more swap or virtual memory space on your laptop's hard drive. All of this puts an additional drain on your laptop's battery. Instead of leaving multiple applications and windows open, use only what you need at any given time. If your laptop has plenty of memory, then keep multiple applications open to avoid loading repeatedly from the hard drive. Close all the applications that run in the background on your computer like your PDA syncing software or USB hard drive backup software.

Designed with these sorts of circumstances in mind, most Battery-Saver or Eco modes will engage a number of automatic changes to lengthen usable battery life—many of the same changes we'll be making here. This saved profile will adjust your laptop's settings and shift components into low-power states to help you ration your remaining juice a bit longer.

Once you've turned on the automatic battery-saver tool, there are still plenty of steps to take to eke out even better efficiency. This is done by turning off unnecessary devices, adjusting settings to reduce power consumption, shutting down unwanted apps and processes, and adjusting your activities to use less power.

One culprit often responsible for draining the battery ahead of its time is the presence of errant software applications that suck up disproportionate processor cycles. Unnecessary utilities running in the background, or an app that is hanging, can also cause this effect. Web browsers are particularly prone to the latter problem, due to the multiple plug-ins, rendering engines, and scripting engines embedded within them.

Modern CPUs save power by dynamically scaling back their clock speed to the minimum possible, but they can do so only when apps aren’t active. If you fail to deal with rogue apps, they will not only drain battery power—they might also slow down your entire system. One clue to the existence of an errant app is if your laptop fan frequently kicks into high gear when the machine should be idle.

Resolving the problem is relatively straightforward: Press the Ctrl-Alt-Delete key combination, launch Windows Task Manager, and use it to identify processes that are showing unexplained high utilization. If a program won’t exit normally, terminate the offending process by right-clicking it and selecting Kill Process. For Web browsers, shutting off all instances usually works. Should all else fail, perform a system restart.

Defragmentation makes your hard drive more efficient which results in a fast hard drive and hence less battery consumption. You can defrag your hard disk using Windows inbuilt Disk defragmenter or using external tool such as Defraggler.

To use Windows Disk Defragmenter, click on “Start” button and type “Disk defragmenter” (without quotes) in the search box and press Enter key. Disk defragmenter window will appear. Now click on “Configure schedule” to schedule the defragmentation process. Now select the frequency, day, time and disks from the given drop downs and press OK.

As power consuming as hard drives are, CD and DVD drives are worse.  Even having one in the drive can be power consuming.  They spin, taking power, even when they?re not actively being used.  Wherever possible, try to run on virtual drives using programs like Alcohol 120% rather than optical ones.

You can disable unneeded hardware devices or ports to squeeze out a few more minutes of power, although this option isn’t possible with every laptop. Start by disabling unneeded wireless capabilities, such as built-in data modems and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios (many laptops have hardware switches for this purpose).

The optical-disc drive is another power guzzler that can drain batteries fast, so don’t leave a DVD or Blu-ray disc in the drive if you don’t need it. Finally, many laptops these days come with backlit keyboards; these are great when you’re in a dark environment, but you can save precious power by doing without the feature when your laptop is running on battery power. Have we missed any great tips? How do you ensure that your laptop is up for the long haul? Please share in the comments section below.

Low screen resolution consumes less battery in comparison to high screen resolution. To change the resolution right click on desktop and select “Screen resolution”. Windows Vista users can find this option under “Personalize”. Now move the slider down to decrease the screen resolution. You can also choose from the drop down option.

Configure your laptop for the various scenarios in which you use it (on a plane, at the coffee shop, at the office, and so on). You can do this through the Hardware Profiles menu by right-clicking on My Computer and selecting Preferences or by using a freeware utility such as SparkleXP.

You left your PC for sometime without any activity. Screensaver starts playing after some time. It consumes the battery so it is better to turn it off. Right click on your desktop and select Personalize. Now on the bottom right, click on “Screen Saver”. Click on Screen Saver drop down and select “None”. Click OK.

This will allow you to process more with the memory your laptop has, rather than relying on virtual memory.  Virtual memory results in hard drive use, and is much less power efficient. Note that adding more RAM will consume more energy, so this is most applicable if you do need to run memory intensive programs which actually require heavy usage of virtual memory.

Mute the speakers and try avoiding the use of multimedia software to maximize the battery life. Installed sound schemes also drain a battery perceptibly.

In the Stand By mode (or sleep mode), the computer turns of the hard drive and the display but memory remains active while the CPU slows down. This draws on the battery. In contrast, hibernation mode is better because the computer saves the current state and shuts itself down completely thus saving power.

A laptop with blocked air vents will generate more heat thus reducing the life of the battery. Clean the air vents regularly to keep operating temperatures low. Allow for open space around the vents for air to circulate freely. Keep the area around the laptop clean to avoid entry of dust.

If your laptop has an AMD or Nvidia graphics chip, there’s a good chance it will also have integrated graphics (usually Intel). In theory, it should be set up so the powerful graphics chip is only used when playing games or running demanding applications, but you should check whether this is the case. As with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, manufacturers sometimes offer a utility to manually switch between graphics chips. You may have to reboot, but most modern designs allow you to switch on the fly. We’ve seen such laptops last twice as long on battery power when the integrated graphics chips is used instead of the Nvidia or AMD chip.

Another option is to ditch the hard drive entirely, and upgrade to a solid-state drive (SSD). Solid-state drives use flash memory instead of a spinning disk, so there are no moving parts, automatically offering more energy efficiency. It also removes the problems associated with fragmentation, which is a larger problem with hard drives. Upgrading to an SSD will both improve your battery life, and put some pep in your system, as SSDs offer faster performance and boot times than their traditional counterparts.Finally, add some more RAM to your system. RAM stores data for short term use in flash modules, much like an SSD. The more data that can be put into RAM, the less reliant the system will be on pulling that data afresh from the hard drive. Again, reducing hard drive activity reduces the power consumption, but like an SSD upgrade, adding RAM also has performance benefits that you will notice immediately.