Are you searching tips for “How to improve Laptop Battery Life” ? Most laptops don’t last too long once you unplug them from the mains. Some don’t even have removable batteries, so swapping the empty one out for a fully charged spare isn’t an option.
These days, laptops have improved microprocessors, sharper graphics, and beefier storage. They’re also more efficient than ever. There are some things you can do to extend Laptop Battery Life. You can make your laptop run longer on its battery by turning off or reduce all the things that expend power in your computer. Whether you own a Windows laptop or are running a different operating system, follow these general tips and your laptop will last longer between charges. Here, we share our 10 tips to increase Laptop Battery Life.
Tips to improve Laptop Battery life
1. Enable power saver mode
Just about every laptop has some kind of power saving mode. Enabling power saving mode will automatically improve your computer’s battery efficiency with small adjustments such as dimming your monitor and setting a quicker sleep timer.
Windows: Select the battery icon on the task bar then choose the bubble labeled Power saver. Alternatively, from your computer’s Control Panel choose Power Options. From here you can manually configure your power settings to reduce the power consumption by setting a timer to enter Sleep mode and adjusting brightness (you’ll be surprised how much these add up). You can jump into advanced battery settings, which will allow you to disable ports, various display quality, and desktop settings. These settings can also reduce your efficiency if you set them improperly, though, so watch out.
Mac: Click on the battery icon in the upper right corner then choose Open Energy Saver Saver Preferences then set your desired energy saving preferences.
2. Activate Your Laptop’s Battery Saver Mode or Eco Mode
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.
3. Dim the display
The display on your laptop uses a ton of energy. When you disconnect the power cord, it’s best to dim the brightness down below half or to a level that is suitable for your eyes. This can be done by going to the Charms menu and select Settings. The brightness options are located above the keyboard icon and next to the volume menu.
If your laptop includes it, you should also disable the automatic brightness feature, and dim the keyboard backlight. To do this, go to Settings, click on the “Change PC settings” option, tap on PC and Devices, followed by Display, and turn off the “Adjust my screen brightness automatically” slider.
To dim the keyboard backlight, open the Charms menu, click on Search, type in “mobility,” and select Windows Mobility Center.
4. Eject any discs you aren’t currently using
If your computer has an disc drive, remember, your battery will drain faster when it’s spinning a disc. Some PC games let you install the entire program to the hard drive, so choose this option whenever possible and you’ll get more life out of the laptop. Needless to say, your laptop battery will last much longer when using programs that require less physical hardware response and therefore put a smaller drain on system resources.
5. Disconnect peripherals
Devices plugged into ports will drain power. Familiar culprits are webcams, USB thumbsticks, or wireless PC cards. We’d recommend you get used to employing your notebook’s touchpad instead of using an external mouse on the plane. Wireless connectivity options such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi can also drain your supply, so be sure these radios and hands-free earpieces are turned off.
6. Close any background apps
You may not realize just how much more power you’ll use by having multiple apps running at the same time. You should take stock of which apps are running in the background and killing your battery.
Mac users can identify which apps are sucking power by clicking on the battery icon in the upper right corner. From here, you’ll find a list of all the power-sucking apps. You can click on any app in this list to get an overview of your how your computer is spending its battery. Make sure to close any of the apps that you’re not currently using.
Windows users should make sure you’re not running anything extra by glancing at the taskbar on the bottom of your screen. Alternatively, go to the Windows Control Panel and type in Task Manager into the search bar. This will pull up an overview of all the apps you’re currently running and how much power they’re using.
7. Upgrade Components
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.
8. Calibrate your battery
If your battery isn’t holding a charge for as long as it once did, regular recalibration can help regain some of that lost capacity. We recommend calibrating your battery every one-to-three months. To recalibrate your battery, follow these steps:
a.) Charge your battery to 100 percent. Once it reaches a full charge, leave it plugged in for another hour or two.
b.) Disconnect from the power source, and keep your machine running until it gives you a battery level warning and begs you to be plugged back in. Ignore this warning, and let it die completely. Make sure you’ve saved anything important before this happens.
c.) After your computer has died, let it stay dead for another 1-2 hours for good measure.
d.) Once it’s sufficiently dead, plug it back in and let it reach a full charge before using it again. When it reaches 100 percent, your battery has been properly calibrated.
9. Install battery management software
There are a number of good applications – both free and paid – that can help you keep track of your battery’s health. Some of them, like coconutBattery and Battery Health (Mac) will simply give you helpful stats, whereas other software like Watts can actually remind you when to calibrate. For Windows, we suggest BatteryCare or BatteryMon.
10. Make sure your drivers and software are updated
Generally, newer drivers and software are designed to be more efficient, and are likely to be less resource hungry. Make sure all your software is up to date.
Windows: Check updates by opening the control panel and selecting Windows Update. From here you can install any necessary driver or software updates.
Mac: In Finder, open the App Store and choose the Updates tab located in the upper right corner. From here, you’ll find a list every available update.