How to Increase Your Laptop & Notebook Battery Power
The actual life of a laptop battery will vary with computer usage habits. In a survey by chipmaker Intel, 57% of laptop users said they wished their batteries lasted longer
Depending upon the model, a notebook battery usually lasts from 1 to 8 hours. However, with efficient battery usage, an hour or two of battery power can significantly be increased. You can save battery power by using the built-in battery saving modes and by following good notebook battery-saving practices.
Built-in battery-saving modes are Stand By and Hibernate. In the Stand By mode, open applications are stored in the RAM, the hard disks power down, the monitor switches off, but the processor goes on running. When you again perform some activity of the mouse or the keyboard, then the hard disk powers up, the monitor switches on, and the data from the RAM is activated, restoring your notebook exactly the way you left it.
Here are some tips to extend the life of your laptop battery:
1. Power down the display
Lowering the brightness may give you as much as an extra hour of runtime. And to increase even more the lifetime of your battery lower the screen resolution and color depth. This will decrease the workload on the GPU, thus extending the battery runtime.
To change this settings follow the steps below:
a. Open the Windows Start menu and click the Control Panel
b. Open the Display menu
c. In the new window click the Appearance tab. Under the Advanced button you can disable extra features like ClearType fonts and fade effects which will cut down on the CPU’s power consumption
d. Now go to the Settings tab
e. Here adjust the color depth to 16 bit. This is more than enough in office and internet applications.
2. Turn off unused devices
Many new notebooks provide a hard-wired On/Off switch for the Wi-Fi radio for this reason.
To save even more power go to the Control Panel, select System-->Hardware-->Device Manager, and disable the following items: Ethernet adapter, infrared transceiver, and Bluetooth radio . You should do this beacause having Bluetooth enabled and not using it actually consumes quite a bit of power.
3. Decrease hard drive activity
Defragmenting your hard drive regularly will decrease the frecuency with which your hard disk has to spin, therefore the battery will last longer. This is due to the fact that defragmentation optimizes the placement of the data on the drive and when a program makes a request for certain data it can be found more quickly.
To defragment your hard disk follow the steps in this article.
Another way to decrease hard drive activity is to set your paging file to a fix value, and this value should be around 1.5 times the amount the RAM you have installed on your computer.
To set the paging file go to the Control Panel and click through System -> Advanced -> Performance Settings -> Advanced -> Virtual Memory Change.
4. Disable startup items
Startup items are programs that load into memory every time Windows boots up and cause other open applications to spill over virtual memory and adds to the CPU load, shortening battery runtime. Here is how to remove some of them that are not necessary.
5. Condition the battery
Battery memory is where the battery becomes conditioned to run for less time than it is designed to run. Say for example, you run your computer on battery for an hour and then you plug it back in to let it recharge. The battery will become conditioned to run only an hour before it runs out of juice.
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