- Dimming your laptop screen is one of the best and easiest ways to increase your laptop batteries run time.
- Turn off your Wi-Fi wireless and Bluetooth if not needed. Most laptops have shortcut keys or even a physical switch to quickly disable wireless networking. This is a another great quick way to increase battery run time.
- Tweak your computers power options. We like to choose a laptop power scheme that turns off the notebook monitor and hard disk after ten minutes or less of inactivity.
- Decrease your laptops speaker volume or even mute it all together if not in use. This is a quick way to gain a little extra juice.
- Disabling various scheduled tasks that you may have running in the background can conserve CPU cycles and thus increase battery run time.
- Don’t play computer games, music, movies as multimedia activities drain laptop batteries quicker than ever. Save these activities to when your laptop is plugged in.
- Use the laptops touchpad instead of an external USB mouse.
- Turning off various auto-save features in your applications such as Microsoft Office can conserve some CPU cycles and additionally minimise hard drive usage to increase battery run time.
- If possible run programs off the internal hard drive instead of your laptops external drive as it typically consumes less power.
- If your laptop is not going to be used for an extended period of time such as a week or more remove the battery from the laptop and store it by itself.
- If your laptop is very old it may have a nickel-metal hydride battery. If this is the case completely drain and recharge the battery once a month to maximise its capacity to hold a charge.
- Limit the exposure of your laptop battery to extremely high or low temperatures. Like humans batteries also have a comfortable operating temperature.
- Fully charge and discharge a new laptop battery pack before use especially if the battery pack is the older style nickel-metal hydride type battery.
- If your laptop is always plugged into a wall outlet or docking station it is better to run the laptop without the battery installed for it is not necessary to leave the battery in a constant state of charging. Better to save your battery for when you need it, such as when you are actually mobile.
- Defragging your computer before you go mobile can increase your laptop battery life run time. Your hard drive will operate more efficiently, thus reducing battery demands. Just make sure you don’t defrag when you are running on the battery.
- Upgrading your systems memory can in some cases increase laptop battery life run time. If your laptop is constantly running out of physical (RAM) memory it will have to utilise the swap file which resides on the hard disk. If your system is running efficiently however (i.e. you do not receive virtual memory notifications) with the amount of memory you currently have, then increasing the memory in this case may actually reduce battery life since each memory module requires electricity to run.
- Use hibernate over standby, standby still puts drain on your laptop’s battery where hibernate puts your computer into an off state.
- Make sure your laptop running cool for they operate more efficiently when running at a comfortable operating temperature. If your laptop is used often and there is noticeable dust build up in the laptops vents, you should from time to time clean your laptop out with compressed air. Another great way to keep your laptop cool, especially in hot environments, is to use a cooler podium such as the Cooler master cool pad.
- Tweak your Power Options. Set your screen and hard drive to go off after a few minutes, and additionally make sure your system is set to go into standby and/or hibernate. If you don’t mind a potential performance hit, setting your laptop to run in “max battery” mode will run your laptops processors at its minimum operating frequency giving you a nice increase in run time.
- Limit heavy tasks such as gaming or other CPU intensive tasks like encoding music or videos. Also try if possible to simply limit your multitasking by working with one program at a time. Additionally keep to basic activities such as email and word processing for they consume little CPU cycles to run thus putting less drain on your laptops battery.
