HOW TO BOOST YOUR LAPTOP BATTERY LIFE

HOW TO BOOST YOUR LAPTOP BATTERY LIFE

I have received lots of complain from laptop users about their laptop's short battery life, so I decided to post this. This is coming from years of experience with laptops and a little bit of research on how to conserve your battery life, so sit back, read, enjoy and apply the following tweaks to your machine.

HARDWARE TWEAKS

• Screen brightness This is a huge power sink; it takes up to 50% of the available battery. The more the brightness, the more battery power that is consumed, so always reduce the brightness to the minimum. It is advisable to use your laptop screen only when needed.

• Wireless and Bluetooth I wonder why people will just leave their wireless and bluetooth device on when not in use. They drain      down your laptop battery considerably, so please, just turn them off.

• Add more RAM Sounds unrelated!!! It is. The virtual memory feature of windows ensures that the hard disk memory is used when the system runs out of RAM which requires more battery power, so my advice, increase your RAM especially when you make use of high memory applications.

• Remove unneeded peripherals USB flash drives, external hard drives, PC card modems, optical drives, iPod, phones should be ejected when not needed. Even when they are needed, find a way to reduce the amount of time they spend connected to your system. Transfer files from your external media to your local disk, cd/dvds should not be left spinning in your drive and use your touchpad instead of an external mouse.

• Externally cool your system Here is the silent killer, the hotter your laptop is, the faster the cooling fans have to work and the more the power required, so as much as you can, try to cool your laptop temperature externally. Don’t place it on cloths, bed or tables where it won’t be well ventilated. Cooling your laptop also has the advantage that your hardware will last longer since they are less likely to overheat and fail.

• Defrag often Defragmentation rearranges files on your hard drive making it run faster, the faster your hard drive works, the lesser amount of battery that will be battery consumed. Personally, I defrag my drive monthly using defragmenter, you can also use the one that came with windows.

SOFTWARE TWEAKS

• Background applications Every application you leave running consumes a portion of your hardware resource, this add up to the power consumption. Use the task manager (ctrl + alt + del) to kill unwanted applications. Sidebar gadgets, manufacturer applications, windows update etc. should be killed.

• Avoid Screen savers Screensavers don’t save power when they contain high graphics, so it’s best if you just turned them off altogether. They use CPU even when the computer is idle.

• Power options Make good use of the power options by setting options to select when on battery power and when running on external supply. I personally use battery care software to change the options automatically.

• Disable search index This is another windows feature that indexes your files for quick searching. It is a trade-off between convenience and battery life, so you should disable it if you don’t search often. 

• Disable automatic program updates Uberfacts says that adobe flash spends more time updating than you would actually use the program. Windows update, Java updater and others run in the background making use of battery life and not really doing anything tangle. Set them to update manually.

OTHER TWEAKS

• Hibernation vs. Sleep mode Putting your machine in sleep mode saves your work and puts your computer in idle state so that you can quickly resume from where you stopped anytime but it still make use of a small amount of power while in this state. Hibernation mode stores all volatile memory on disk, shuts down your machine and requires no power in this state. The best option is to hibernate your laptop when it is not going to be put to use for a while. 

• Power cord I have seen Alaba boys convert a Dell charger for use by a Toshiba laptop, WRONG! WRONG!! WRONG!!! Please ensure to use the ‘follow-come’ power cord/adapter, others will only kill your laptop’s battery.

• Remove Battery when not in use If you won’t be making use of your laptop for a while (more than 4 days), you need to remove your batteries completely from the laptop and put it back when you are ready to use it. Laptop batteries are best stored in a cool, dry place and at 40% charge rather than 100% charge.

Thanks for reading... Please feel free to add your thoughts in the comment box below.