If you own a laptop then you know exactly what I’m talking about. Those last few moments, when you wish you could give up some of your own blood to make your laptop last just a few minutes more. Those moments where you keep watching the battery life monitor as it slowly ticks down….5%….4%….. and then your computer enters into suspend mode or hibernation. If only you could get your laptop to last just a tad bit longer! How nice would that be?

Well these tips should help you do just that.

The Five Pointers to Extending Your Laptop’s Battery Life

1. Remove All Unnecessary Running Programs - Any software that you are running which takes up any amount of CPU power is eating your battery life away like acid. If you are a multi-tasker like I am then you are going to have to give that up when you go mobile so that you can extend the working time of your machine. Close any programs that you no longer plan to use. Also close programs that are in your system tray (The small icons on the bottom right side of your start bar).
2. Turn Off Excess Hardware - I was shocked to see what plugging in a wireless USB mouse did to my battery life. I shaved off 20 minutes by using my Logitech USB mouse. If you want your laptop to last you may just want to make due with your touch pad.My smaller, portable laptop comes with a switch to turn off my wireless card. This is a great way to save on battery life if I am not using the internet while on my laptop’s battery. So remove any USB devices you don’t utterly need and also disable any hardware that you can do without (such as wireless and blue tooth.) If you don’t know what this stuff is, ask your LCG. He can tell you more about them.
3. Dim Your Laptop’s Screen - This is a tough call. If you are in a bright area then this may not work for you. If you can swing it, though, then this is one of the biggest battery savers for your machine. The screen accounts for up to 75% of the power that your laptop goes through on a regular basis. If you dim the screen down a bit then you stand to save significant amounts of power. I can double my laptop’s battery life by switching from the brightest screen setting to the dimmest setting (which is still viewable indoors for me.) You will find what is the best balance between screen brightness and battery life for you.
4. Exercise Your Battery - This is an age old tip for working with rechargeable batteries. You can literally condition them to work longer and harder than they would otherwise. The trick to this? Simple, when you start to discharge the battery (say for 30 minutes) allow the battery to actually discharge for its full life cycle (3 hours or so depending on your battery). If you can pull this off then you will find that your battery will gain an extra 10% or so of battery life over time. In order for this to work you also have to charge it completely after you have completely discharged it! So be sure that you’ll be able to have the time to charge it all the way when you get around to charging it back up!
5. Set your power settings to power save mode - Your laptop (if it isn’t set up this way already) has an option that allows you to cut the CPU speed in favor of saving you some serious battery life. To find your power manager just find the battery icon (or plug icon if it is plugged in) and right click it and select “power options”. The dialog that pops up should have an option for setting your computer from dynamic or high performance to power save mode when your system is on battery. This will give you a fairly large boost to how long you can go without a battery.

Squeeze it like a lemon!

Hopefully this short guide will help you to save just that little extra bit of power from your system. It is always nice to have a laptop that doesn’t choke and die 20 minutes after it is unhooked from the wall. So allow it to be efficient about its power use and it will thank you by lasting just that little bit longer!

God Bless,
-Daniel Kolansky