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Laptops come with a lot of features that drain battery life, which can make it difficult when you’re trying to work and you cannot find a place to plug it in for charging. Most times laptop users are unaware of the things which drain their batteries, yet most of these are often left idle and not in use. Switching off some of these can add to your battery life. The following tips will go a long way in helping you Improve the laptop Battery Life.
1. Lower your screen brightness.
The screen backlight uses the most power out of all the components on your laptop; and dimming it to appropriate levels will add some valuable life to your battery. Modern laptops come with LED backlights but these also drain a modest amount of your laptop power. By simply dimming your screen, you can add 30 minutes or more to the life of your battery
2. Change the power settings on your laptop.
In most cases, the default power setting in Windows is “balanced settings” rather than “power saver” mode. Windows normally uses different power settings depending on whether the laptop is running on battery power or mains. In the control panel, select power options and choose the right option. You can also adjust all the settings of each of these power options in the advanced settings.
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3. Unplug all USB devices and other peripherals.
Every USB device attached to your laptop consumes power when it registers itself on the system. CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays also drain the battery life of your computer even when they are just lying idle in the disc drive. When you’re not using any of these, it is very important to unplug or eject these as this will add battery life to your laptop.
4. Disable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
Both of these can consume a fair amount of your laptop battery power so if you’re not using any of them, it would be a wise move to turn them off, especially when running your laptop on battery power. Most laptops have a key which you can use to disable wi-fi, but for Bluetooth, you may have to go to the start menu to disable it.
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5. Turn off backlit keyboards.
While a backlit keyboard will help you if in the dark, it will also drain your laptop battery. If you’re in a room with light, then make it a point to turn it off. By turning this light off, you will save some power for your laptop battery. Every notebook has its own way of turning this off but in most cases, it involves hitting a function key on the top row.
6. Minimize hard drive usage.
Minimizing the usage of your hard drive will also go a long way in helping you add to the battery life of your laptop. There are several ways you can minimize the activity of your hard drive like;
- · Defragment your hard drive. This will reduce the time it takes for your hard drive to spin around looking for data, saving you some battery power.
- · Replace your hard drive with an SSD. SSDs have no moving parts and therefore, use less power than hard drives. They also don’t require defragmentation.
- · Add more RAM. Switching from a 2GB RAM to a 4 or 8GB RAM will allow your computer to use less virtual memory and more physical memory thus limiting hard drive accesses.
7. Buy a new battery.
Laptop batteries are not designed to last a life time and time comes when all the tips above may do little to improve battery life with the only solution being buying a new one. Batteries degrade and wear out over time and after many years of hard use, you’ll find that the battery lasts half of the time it used to take or even less. This is when you need to consider replacing it. However, you must ensure that you replace it with a battery that will last longer and perform as expected.
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The following tips will be very helpful when buying a battery for an extended battery life;
- · Look for laptop batteries with a power rating of not less than 5,000 mAH. The greater the capacity of the battery, the better
- Insist on LiON or Li-Poly batteries only and not NiCad or NiMH batteries because they last longer and are less bulky.
- Buy laptop batteries that are compatible with your computer. I recommend A1 Batterypro for battery lookup of popular laptop models.
- Check the service life (the time the battery will function optimally) before buying.
