Just as you are about applying finishing touches to a design your clients needs ready in the next 30 minutes, your laptop’s battery goes bung. With no power outlet in sight, you begin to wonder if you actually purchased the right notebook or probably your battery has suddenly gone bad. Most times, it could be as a result of not optimizing your laptop for an improved and longer battery life.
There are a bunch of factors that would usually affect the extent to which your laptops battery can last and working on these various tips will go a long way in helping you squeeze out the most juice out of your device’s power house.
Follow the below tested and trusted tips to improving any PC/MAC notebook’s battery retaining capacity.
1. Dim The Display
High brightness of any screen would usually sap a lot of energy from a laptop’s battery and as a result would bring about reduced battery lasting usage ability. The key to improving your battery life from this perspective is reducing the brightness of your screen.
Most laptops come with brightness adjustment buttons at the function keys, but if you do not find those at your F-Keys, you can go to Control Panel > Hardware and Sounds > Power options and make necessary screen adjustments there for Windows.
- Must Read: Best Free Screen Capture Tools (Softwares)
2. Disable Background Apps
Most times, you might not notice that there are background apps running while you work with your PC. These applications definitely result in a noticeable decrease in your battery life and disabling them is the all you need to get that stolen power. You can find the background running processes using your Task Manager (Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc or Ctrl + Alt + Del simultaneously to enable) and then disabled the apps.
3. Disable Unnecessary Devices (Bluetooth, Wifi, USB)
It is better to use your inbuilt touchpad and keyboard while running your laptop from it’s battery rather than use a USB mouse/keyboard as they would depend on your Laptop’s battery to operate. You should also disable your Wifi and Bluetooth radio even if no wireless device is connected to your PC as they still draw power from your battery.
Also disconnect any dongle attached to your notebook via USB such as smartphone, using them would definitely shorten your battery life.
4. Avoid CD/DVD
Yeah, that’s right. The power required to spin your CD ROM would quickly drain your battery, therefore avoiding playing CDs with your CD ROM is a wise decision to take when running your laptop from it’s battery without an AC power connection.
5. Defrag Hard Drive Regularly
Disk Defragmenter is an inbuilt windows software that can help you defragment your Hard Disk. This should be done from time to time to help optimize Hard Drives for faster and efficient usage resulting in less power consumption.
6. Reduce Your Screen Resolution
As I have noticed while using my HP Pavilion DV6 Notebook, using high screen resolution comes at a higher cost of your battery than using a low screen resolution. If you won’t be performing any PC task that needs much of display details, you should decrease your screen resolution. To reduce screen resolution in Windows, Right Click on your desktop and select Screen Resolution.
7. Update Your Softwares
Not in all cases would software updates result in an improved battery life anyway, but just bear in mind that most software developers could have applied a patch to their next update that would result in an improved battery life. It won’t hurt updating to a software’s latest update, so why stick to older builds?
8. Discard Your HDD for SSD
A hard drive is a hard drive, right? That’s not totally true. The SSD (Solid State Drive) performs pretty much same function as the HDD (Hard Disk Drive) but in different ways. The SSD uses the flash memory model to operate while the HDD requires a spinning magnetic layer of plates. The spinning in HDD results in extra power usage unlike SSD where this is not the case.
- Must Read: How To Hide Hard Disk Drives In Windows
9. Operate Your Laptop In a Cool Environment
It’s apparent that the hotter your environment, the more your laptops cooling fan works in order to cool your PC from frying your motherboard. The fan is also been powered by your laptops battery and in turn results in more power waste. Working in a cool environment leaves your cooling fan to little or no work at all saving the energy that would have been lost in this effect.
These are tips I’ve really found useful in improving my Notebooks battery life. Have any tip to share? Use the comments.
Image: Digital Trends.com
2 Comments
Battery life of a laptop is another thing entirely. A good laptop without a good battery sucks! Dimming display works like magic, not only that the battery will last longer but it also improve the battery life. I use this tips to get the best out of my laptop battery
Thanks for your great contribution friend. We appreciate as always.