Best tips to extend your laptop’s battery life

If you’re the owner of a laptop, you’ve definitely got in the situation where you couldn’t find any mesh around and you needed a few more seconds to finish watching a movie or sending an e-mail. For you, what I have in mind writing this article is to point out a few simple and efficient methods that can lead to a significant growth of the autonomy of your laptop’s battery.

I’ve divided the advices in two categories: simple measures and a little more complicated ones, that however, bring a significant extend of duration between two successive battery recharges.

Simple measures to extend battery life:

• Use a pair of headphones instead of the laptop’s speakers, because these ones consume much more current
• Select an adequate energy conservation profile in Windows
• Decrease screen’s luminosity as much as possible
• Disable radio controllers that you don’t need. Ex: WiFi, Bluetooth, 3G
• Disable ports you don’t need. Ex: serial/parallel port, Firewire port, fingerprint reader
• Turn off the software that you don’t use
• Don’t run software that intensively uses the notebook’s components. Ex: games, unpacker, audio/video convertors, web-pages with lots of flashes
• Don’t use the peripherals such as :USB mouse, external hard-disks, USB sticks, Express Cards and any other type of peripheral
• Use the latest versions of drivers for your system. These ones bring, besides additional functions and optimizations for the existing ones, especially current consumption
• If you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7, a very good method of increasing the autonomy is to disable window animation at minimization/maximization, to disable transparency effects and also to disable the Aero interface

Advanced measures to prologue battery autonomy

• Modify the wireless network card driver settings
• Modify the energy conservation profile in Windows
• Buy more RAM to prevent the intense usage of the hard-disk
• Use an undervolting software for CPU and frequency decrease
• Use a decreasing software of video card functionality’s frequencies
• Buy a supplementary battery, if your laptop supports one
• get a product with a Pixel Qi e-Ink type display that acts like a portable ebook reader

Long-term advices

If the above-mentioned advices help you immediately, there are also other advices you can follow to assure a smaller deterioration of the battery on its whole functioning duration. It’s a known fact that battery autonomy decreases in time, even on the best laptop computers available out there, because of its usage and aging. So, here are the advices:

• Read the instructions regarding battery storage in case of sustained dis-usage.
• Format the battery at least once a month (discharge it and recharge it completely) and try to always use the battery in complete cycles. (avoid to partially discharge battery and to start recharging it when the battery is not empty yet).
• Use as often as you can the battery, don’t keep the laptop always in gear, at home and at the office.
• if you’re traveling a lot consider purchasing a laptop car power supply

That’s about it with these tips for extending laptop’s battery life. If you know other methods to increase the laptop’s/notebook’s autonomy, please write them down in the comment section. Also, if you have any questions regarding some of the above-mentioned advices, please, don’t be ashamed and leave a comment.

Tags: battery, laptop, tips