0 How to Improve Battery Life of Laptop

Here are some tips to improve your laptop battery life while you are on your battery

1. Adjust the brightness of your screen– Now-a-days, most laptops come with the ability to adjust the brightness of your screen. Some even come with ways to modify CPU and cooling performance. Cut them down to the lowest level you can tolerate. Remember always there is a trade off between battery life and performance.
2. Terminate unnecessary programs running in the background- For Example, chat clients and mail clients may be active and signed in all the time, you may not even use it. Update services for the applications installed in your machine is an overhead when you are on your battery. Shut down everything that isn’t crucial when you’re on battery.
3. Reduce usage of external devices– USB devices (including your mouse and external keyboard, music players), drain down your laptop battery. Remove all the unnecessary external devices when not in use. If you had plugged in a music player (say, iPod), it may be getting charged by quickly wiping out the charge on your laptop battery.
4. Use Wired LAN instead of WiFi– Whenever you are on your battery and wired LAN is available, then use the wired one instead WiFi. This will save a lot for you.
5. Turn off Bluetooth and WiFi– Bluetooth and WiFi drains down your laptop battery quickly. So whenever you are on battery, turn off Bluetooth and WiFi if it’s not necessary.
6. Remove the optical disks from drives- Even having a disk in the drive can be power consuming, they spin, taking power, even when they are not actively being used. So when you are on your battery, remove the optical disks from the drives if it’s not necessary.
7. Run off a HDD rather than Optical disks– As CD or DVD or any other optical drives are more of power consuming than hard drive, wherever possible, try to run on virtual drives using programs virtual drive applications.
8. Set up and optimize your power options– Go to ‘Power Options’ in your windows control panel (In a windows machine) and set it up so that power usage is optimized (Select the ‘max battery’ for maximum effect). Keep in mind that, always there is a trade off between battery life and performance.
9. Avoid multitasking to a possible extent– Do one thing at a time when you’re on battery. Rather than working on a spreadsheet, letting your email client run in the background and listening to your latest set of MP3’s, set your mind to one thing only. If you don’t you’ll only drain out your batteries before anything gets completed!
10. Go easy on the PC demands– The more you demand from your PC. Passive activities like email and word processing consume much less power than gaming or playing an HD movie. If you’ve got a single battery charge – pick your priorities wisely.
11. Turn off the autosave function- MS-Word’s and Excel’s autosave functions are great, but because they keep saving regular intervals, they make your hard drives spin more. Turn this feature off whenever you are on your batter, but you have to make sure your work is saved when your battery dies.
12. Lower the graphics use- You can do this by changing the screen resolution and shutting off fancy graphic drivers. Graphics cards (video cards) use as much or more power today as hard disks.

Keep the following things in mind, if you want to squeeze out some extra battery juice on the go.

1. Perform disk defragmentation regularly- The faster your hard drive works the lesser drains your battery. Make your hard drive as efficient as possible by performing disk defragmentation regularly. (But not while it’s on battery of course!) Mac OSX is better built to handle fragmentation so it may not be very applicable for Apple systems.
2. Add more RAM- 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.
3. Keep the battery contacts clean- Clean your battery’s metal contacts every couple of months with a cloth moistened with rubbing alcohol. This keeps the transfer of power from your battery more efficient.
4. Take care of your battery- Exercise the Battery. Do not leave a charged battery dormant for long periods of time. Once charged, you should at least use the battery at least once every two to three weeks. Also, do not let a Li-On battery completely discharge. (Discharging is only for older batteries with memory effects)
5. Prevent the Memory Effect- If you’re using a very old laptop, you’ll want to prevent the ‘memory effect’ – Keep the battery healthy by fully charging and then fully discharging it at least once every two to three weeks. Exceptions to the rule are Li-Ion batteries (which most laptops have) which donot suffer from the memory effect.
6. Hibernate, not standby or sleep – Although placing a laptop in standby mode saves some power and you can instantly resume where you left off, it doesn’t save anywhere as much power as the hibernate function does. Hibernating a PC will actually save your PC’s state as it is, and completely shut itself down.
7. Keep operating temperature down- Your laptop operates more efficiently when it’s cooler. Clean out your air vents with a cloth or keyboard cleaner.
8. Consider buying Netbook- If you have nothing to do with your laptop other than chatting, browsing or watching a movie, then consider buying a notebook. Now-a-days Taiwan giant ASUS’s prestigious EeePC netbook is coming with more than 14 hrs backup.