A lot of use can cause the battery life of our notebook/laptops to be drain out very easily, as the configuration of notebook get better, the usage of battery increases and features like bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and graphic driver make the better sinks like sandbox. While one can use some of the tips to improves the battery life without any tweaks or hacks, only simple steps which any one can follow.
- Reduce display brightness – The best way to save on battery life is to reduce the brightness of your LCD. it uses a lot of battery and hence leads to draining of charge faster. Set up different power plans for different situations so that you can easily switch between them according to needs.
- Use minimum external peripherals – Disconnect peripherals connected to external ports of the laptop. Components such as mouse, speakers, laptop cooler etc. draw up power from the battery. Use the touchpad instead of using the mouse.
- Use Power Management options – Use the systems inbuilt power management options. Set the screensaver time to 1minute.
- Turn of speakers, WiFi and Bluetooth – Do not forget to turn off WiFi, Bluetooth if you are not using them. Also mute the speakers to save some crucial battery life, use headphones instead.
- Monitor running processes – Keep a close eye on the processes running in the background to see the amount of CPU and RAM they are using. Close any unnecessary processes that are using CPU/RAM resources. For XP one can run the system with as less as 18 active process and Vista with 48 active process
- Do not leave CD/DVD in the drive – Leaving a CD/DVD in the optical drive leads to unnecessary spinning of the head and power up of lenses which consumes power.
- Upadte drivers and softwares – This might not lead to significant battery boost up but still it is recommended to keep your laptop drivers and various softwares updated. Most driver bring in reduced power consumption and CPU usage which in turns also saves the battery.
These tips shall help you to increase your laptop battery life by a good amount. if you need longer backup or else buy a spare battery. Or instead try this great freeware software which turns of itself all the unnecessary features like USB ports, lan port, card reader slots etc to save battery life automatically.