Extend Laptop Battery Life

Tips For Longer Battery Life

It's important to understand what drains the most power in your laptop. In modern laptops, the LCD display consumes about 43 per cent of normal operating power. Under the hood, the chipset - video, graphics, audio, math coprocessor, etc. - eats another 22 per cent. The CPU accounts for 9 per cent of power consumption, while a graphics processor takes another 8 per cent. The hard drive takes only 5 per cent, and network adapters consume only 4 per cent. So obviously, power conservation efforts should focus first on the display. Here's how to tweak your settings to save the juice.

Microsoft Windows has a Power Options section in Control Panel that can help you optimize your laptop's performance vs. power consumption trade-off. You can use one of the pre-defined Power Plans that kick in depending on whether you're operating on battery or wall power. The plans control how bright the display is; when to turn off the display during periods of inactivity; when to turn off the hard drive to save power; and what CPU performance level to use when on battery power. Tweaking these plans to fit your computing habits and performance needs can extend battery life significantly.

You can also manually adjust the display brightness to suit the environment; you don't really need the brightest setting in a dim coffee shop. On most laptops, you can change the screen brightness by holding down the Fn button and pressing one of the function keys on the top row of the keyboard. On my Toshiba laptop, Fn+F6 reduces the brightness, and Fn+F7 will make it brighter. When power is low, turn it down as much as possible.

To further stretch your battery time, avoid video games, listening to music, watching videos (especially high-resolution videos) and other graphics-intensive applications while on battery. Turn off the wifi adapter if you don't need to access to the Internet. And of course, don't try to charge your iPod or cell phone via USB, if your laptop's battery life is dwindling.

Sleep or Hibernate?

It's worth noting the difference between "sleep" and "hibernation" modes here, as either can be set in the Power Options plans. Sleep mode stores your laptop's current state, including all open apps and data files, in RAM before shutting down virtually all of your system. A bit of power is used to maintain the state of RAM so it isn't lost during sleep mode. Hibernation saves the laptop's state to the hard drive, allowing the laptop to shut down completely when it is not in use. Your desktop is restored from either mode, but restoration is faster from sleep mode because everything is already in RAM. Restoring from hibernation takes a bit longer, depending on the speed of your system. Hibernation is also safer, because power might be lost during sleep mode and all your data would be lost too.

Every battery wears out eventually. The number of times you can recharge a battery depends on many factors, but just a couple of rules will help maximize your battery's service life. Do not fully discharge your battery deliberately. Old nickel-cadmium batteries had to be full discharged from time to time, but modern lithium-ion batteries' life spans are actually shortened by full discharges.

When your battery will no longer hold sufficient charge to get your through the day, it's time to buy a new one. Consider extended-life batteries with more cells (and weight), and look into refurbished laptop batteries that can save you 50 per cent or more vs. the cost of brand-new ones.

Do you have laptop battery tricks to share? Post your comment or question below...