What component consumes your laptop battery the most?

Have you ever asked yourself which components consume the most from  your laptop battery? I suppose it wasn’t one of your primordial questions, but the answer to this question, is actually useful: knowing what consumes the battery, you can increase the autonomy by not using that much those components or by setting manually their operating speed (if it’s the processor, RAM etc).

Well, hardware and software producers are preoccupied by this aspect, and that is why on Windows 7 developing team’s blog, has been published an article regarding the way the laptop’s battery is consumed and what components, software, drivers influences its autonomy.

The responsible components for the battery’s autonomy are the following:

1. LCD screen
2. Chipset
3. CPU
4. Graphics card
5. Hard disk
6. Network card (wireless or with wire)

This list is also influenced by component choosing , for example an on board graphics chipset consumes more than a normal chipset, but altogether the laptop has a bigger autonomy thanks to its lack of on board Graphics. The study does not cater for external devices which the users could connect to USB ports (USB Wireless Card, USB external drive, SD card, USB thumbdrive), Firewire, Express card etc. These are the ones that decrease more the autonomy of your laptop.

The conclusion is pretty simple: in order to have a big autonomy, you will need a big capacity battery, a screen with manually decreased luminosity, an efficient on-board graphs chipset, lots of RAM so it won’t be necessary to use the hard disk too much, a strong WiFi signal and the most important, you must run applications that won’t require too much your CPU or your Graphs card. And obviously, you must not connect external devices.  Note that software plays an important part of a laptop battery life and you can use registry cleaners to maintain your Windows installation up to date and clean, free of pieces of code that only make your CPU consume more power.

Tags: autonomy, battery, laptop