Thursday, November 1, 2012

How To Save Laptop Battery Life

A lot of people use laptops without knowing that their behavior with the machine can affect its battery life.

I'm going to give you some tips how to extend the lifespan of your laptops battery.


DO while on battery:


  • Hibernation - if you don't need to use your laptop for a while, just put it on hibernation. Laptop then saves your opened data and progress to the hard drive and shuts itself down, you can easily resume work when needed.
  • Turn down graphics - while gaming, gpu (graphics card) and cpu (processor) are working harder than usual and that consumes a lot of power.
  • Disable/remove external devices - if you don't need to have that USB drive ( or whatever device you have connected to your laptop ) just remove it. Turning off WiFi and Bluetooth when you're not in the need to use them is also a way to save some extra power.
  • Close background programs - if you don't need to use a program anymore, close it rather than just leaving it run iin the background.
  • Dim the screen - the lower the screen brightness, the longer the battery lasts.
  • Lower temperatures - I have an article about how to do this:
  • Turn off screensaver - screensavers are often some animations and the laptop needs power to draw them.
  • Avoid using DVD/CD/BluRay drives - they need more power to operate than hard drive. Just try not to use them if you're low on power.
  • Use power options - put your machine on power-saver state to save more energy.


also DO:


  • Disk defragmentation - do it often, this way your hard drive doesn't have to work that much because the data is not that spread out on the disk and its easier and faster to find the files needed.
  • Clean battery contacts - if you manage to get some jelly or whatever on the metal contacts, just clean if off with a cloth with alcohol on it.
  • Laptop as desktop - if you're using your laptop as a desktop ( even for a while, this also includes 1 day ), just charge your battery till full and disconnect it ( use the charger as a power source ) or leave the battery connected and use the "turn off battery charging" checkbox in the battery options, you don't need to charge the battery when it's full.
  • Storing the battery - in case of not needing to use the battery for over a week or so, try to recharge it first ( try over 50%, better full ). It helps not to shorten the lifespan of the battery.


DON'T:

Battery and charger - leaving the charger connected to the laptop while its turned on and the battery is also connected and charging even if it's full. Also by having the battery connected and plugging/unplugging the charger very often ( plugging in when the battery is at half power not almost empty, and unplugging when the battery is not almost full or full). This way the battery life shortens.


Note: If you have any ideas or questions feel free to ask, maybe i'll make a post about your idea.

3 comments:

  1. I usualy save my battery by charging it up around 40% then leaving it in a cold area (basement) only to recharge it once a month to 100% then lower it to 40% and put it back in storage.. Works like a charm.

    Also all of your advice on the topic is solid.

    ReplyDelete
  2. useful tips about prolong battery working time.

    ReplyDelete
  3. OMG thanks for the info, i didnt now any of this , im going to try it out. Good post.

    ReplyDelete