For Productive Web Browsing, Gearfire Recommends 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.
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] 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.
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.
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]
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
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 […]
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.
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:)
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.
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
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?
ahhnne said
am November 24 2008 @ 2:02 am
good tips to improve laptops battery..
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.
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.
carissa seo test said
am January 23 2009 @ 12:44 pm
i’m gonna try it, mine is never longer than an hour
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.
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
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.
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!
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
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
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.
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.
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
Keyword Service said
am July 9 2009 @ 2:35 am
Battery life is really important; especially if you are going to hop around from class to class with your computer. I love the hibernate function though, I use it all of the time .. on the go.
-Kevin
Computer Service St Pete said
am September 1 2009 @ 7:14 am
Good advise for improve laptop battery life. Thanks for share helpful information.
Internet Marketing | Net Age said
am September 2 2009 @ 1:50 pm
I just saw a post about the new Nokia notebook/netbook that is about to be launched. You’re looking at 12 hours of battery life! Now put that in your pipe and smoke it!
Cute Graphics said
am September 20 2009 @ 10:41 pm
My gateway only lasted about an hour when it was new when not plugged in ( which is pretty bad I think ). Now it last about 5 minutes when not plugged in.
Cartuse imprimanta said
am November 2 2009 @ 5:25 pm
Great tips! Not sure about the stand-by vs hibernation. I’ve left my laptop [IBM T60] on standby for 2 weeks and when I fired it up, I had 98% battery remaining. Hibernation has always been flaky at best. I’ve lost more work due to hibernation over the year than I care to remember…I say, Standby is the way to go!
Jayvie said
am November 6 2009 @ 8:26 am
great information, i will implement this to my laptop to improve its battery life.
Sara said
am November 7 2009 @ 12:27 am
thanks for the tips, i recommend also that you should buy a backup battery always, in case of emergency for your laptop
Used Tires said
am November 9 2009 @ 6:45 pm
Here is another battery saving tip… don’t plug your laptop into just any outlet you see… I plugged my laptop into an outlet provided by the Amtrak train, I didn’t know the outlet that well, and apparently it pretty much killed my batteries ability to store energy, so… yeah now I have laptop that will only run via the power chord, lol.
Till then,
Jean
Dentist St Petersburg said
am December 11 2009 @ 4:51 am
Good tips to improve laptops battery life. I’ll test these suggestions for improve my laptop battery life.
vektör said
am December 24 2009 @ 7:28 am
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.
Olivia smith said
am December 29 2009 @ 5:41 am
Hi, Thanks for sharing these tips. Also should the laptop be kept on power source always so that it does not drain any battery, or should I always take the power cord off when laptop is fully charged and let it drain and then put the charge back. I really dont know which would be the best way to keep the laptop battery long life. In a few months time my laptop battery is down 15 min. Its Dell 1425.
Scaffold boards said
am January 10 2010 @ 6:19 pm
OK, the tips are really useful! Thanks for them! Hope my battery will last longer from now on.Hibernation has always been flaky at best. I’ve lost more work due to hibernation over the year than I care to remember…I say, Standby is the way to go!
Dan Northern said
am January 15 2010 @ 6:51 pm
These are really helpful tips, especially for someone who is on campus a lot, and away from a charger. I really need to remember to dim the screen on my computer since it is a huge power-waster.
radyo dinle said
am January 17 2010 @ 10:48 am
Re-hashing is for breakfast, sometimes you need something a little meatier in you blog posts, its one of the reasons I keep coming back.
Beautiful Beaches Resorts said
am February 2 2010 @ 9:45 am
The battery tends to die faster if you keep it charged for a long period of time even after its done charging. wall outlets do not know when to stop charging.
Beautiful Beaches Resorts said
am February 17 2010 @ 6:58 am
Now when I turn it on the icon tells me that 2:09 hours are left with only 7% of the battery remaining. Is this a malfunction or did something magically lengthen my battery life?
Jay Willingham - CampusByte said
am February 26 2010 @ 8:59 pm
I applied some of these tips to my laptop since I bring it to campus everyday. It definitely works. Thanks for the tips.
Dan Northern said
am March 3 2010 @ 12:45 am
I desperately need to put these tips into action, I find myself with a dead laptop way to often when I am on campus. Thanks!
webpage maker said
am March 4 2010 @ 1:30 am
Yes about every other week take it off the charger and let it almost die then plug it back in and that should help your battery life, its worked for my laptop.