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Jul  07
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34 Ways to Improve your Laptop Battery Life (+1 app)


I have seen a lot of articles floating around about ways to extend your laptop’s battery life. Even with improving technologies and longer lasting batteries, it is still a pain in the butt having your laptop with a dead battery, in the middle of a 8 hour flight. Below are the best articles I have seen on how to squeeze every second of juice from your lappy’s battery. If you don’t want to read all those, these 5 tips just about sum them up.

1. Dim your laptop screen as low as you can. Most laptops come with this function.

2. Use Windows’ built-in power-saving modes. They regulate cooling and CPU activity, and can greatly increase batter life.

3. Turn off all non-essential processes, such as Limewire, your printer suite, and anything else you won’t be using on the road. All of these suck your battery’s juice, so turn them off if you won’t be using them immediately.

4. Don’t try to do anything CPU-intensive such as compiling a video, using photoshop, or running an anti-virus scan while you aren’t hooked up. These activities drastically reduce battery life.

5. Use the Hibernate function whenever you won’t be accessing your laptop for 1 hour or more. Hibernate copies your RAM to your hard-drive, and then shuts itself off.

Top 15 Ways to Extend your Laptop’s Battery Life [Friedbeef’s Tech]
10 Ways to Extend Laptop Battery Life [Lifehack.org]
Five Tips for Bettery Notebook Battery Life [LaptopMag.com]
4 Tips to Extend the Life of your Laptop Battery [Microsoft.com]
A Great App to track your Battery Usage [BatteryMon]

Update: Andrew has a great list of ways to store all types of batteries over at his site. I like the one about storing your laptop battery at 40% in your refrigerator.

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20 Comments so far »

  1. Andrew Flusche said

    am July 9 2007 @ 7:43 am

    Thanks for the great tips. We’re all in need of handy reminders like this.

    I wrote an article a while back on long-term battery life issues & how to store spare batteries: Get More Life From Your Rechargeable Batteries

  2. It’s all Hard » 34 Ways to Improve your Laptop Battery Life (+1 app) said

    am November 10 2007 @ 9:27 am

    […] read more | digg story […]

  3. Invest with Dax said

    am December 6 2007 @ 2:37 pm

    I’m seeing about 15mins more life with these tips. Not much in absolute terms, but enough to delay my annoyance until I get my next cup of coffee.

  4. paulette said

    am December 12 2007 @ 10:00 am

    The bottom line of it all is to conserve.In doing this, you save time. At the same time you are helping to save our environment too:)

  5. web marketing man said

    am May 17 2008 @ 7:30 am

    I will try some of these tips out. My batteries dont last more then a year. I was told that the Siemens batteries are known to not last. Anyone know if this is not true.

  6. Pink said

    am May 17 2008 @ 11:25 am

    These are great tips that can actually conserve power for our laptop. But it’s best to always prepare a backup battery :)

  7. Steve said

    am August 18 2008 @ 1:27 pm

    Being on the road a lot I am very conscious of my laptop’s battery life. These are great suggestions. I know battery life gets worse on the computer gets older. What is the life expectancy of a laptop battery? Is Marketing man right that a year is all that a battery lasts?

  8. ahhnne said

    am November 24 2008 @ 2:02 am

    good tips to improve laptops battery..

  9. ahhnne said

    am November 24 2008 @ 2:15 am

    this is one way to improve the life of the laptops batteries.. check out for more information.

  10. Hemanth said

    am December 28 2008 @ 1:12 am

    Interesting article. I’ll test these suggestions. Been mad at HP for the very low battery life.

  11. carissa seo test said

    am January 23 2009 @ 12:44 pm

    i’m gonna try it, mine is never longer than an hour :(

  12. current account said

    am January 24 2009 @ 7:51 pm

    Great tips,but it’s best to always prepare a backup battery and be ready for the worse.

  13. BusbySEO Test said

    am January 24 2009 @ 8:31 pm

    You can also repair your dead batteries instead of buy a new one usually it just one of the cells inside has shorted just replace the one bad cell instead of the whole pack

  14. Cewek Bispak said

    am February 10 2009 @ 3:57 am

    No wonder why mine just doesn’t last longer than 45 minutes, my laptop is just full of unknown processes and I think my brother is the one behind all this.

  15. Linda said

    am March 1 2009 @ 6:09 pm

    Good advice. My battery always seems to go when I most need it. As I travel quite a lot I always try and charge my battery when I hanging around the airport. This way when I arive at my destination meeting I do not have the embarrassment of having a dead laptop!

  16. Jeff van der Wiel said

    am March 17 2009 @ 5:47 am

    Worrying about conserving laptop battery life could be a thing of the past with the development of a battery that can charge in seconds, promising a revolution in power storage that could also help green cars and renewable energy.

    See Breakthrough battery can charge up in seconds

  17. Zak said

    am April 8 2009 @ 9:56 am

    Can I add one more to it here. Through my personal experience I have found that over charging or leaving your laptop connected to a power socket sometimes results in demaging your battery cells, also if you let you battery run out every few days and charge it back to full will help your battery last longer

  18. web marketing man said

    am May 28 2009 @ 6:29 am

    And make sure your 3G modem is not attached and operational either! My trusty old HP laptop has never had much of a battery life, 45mins - 1hour max, and paying attention to things like this has enabled me to extract that critical last 5 minutes of computer time when I really needed it the most.

  19. Business Forms Printer said

    am June 17 2009 @ 3:36 am

    Good tips for improve battery life of laptop. I’ll use these tips for improve my laptop battery life. Thanks.

  20. Steven Lance said

    am July 3 2009 @ 9:58 pm

    this is a good tips to improve laptop battery life, i will try those tips on my laptops

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AboutGearfire

Gearfire was created in January of 2007 by Geoff R and Jordan S. Gearfire deals with personal productivity, organization, and Getting Things done from a student's perspective. Gearfire is written entirely by students, and is written towards students, but is usually applicable to a general audience. Our other writers are Daniel and Chris, whom have joined us over the past year.