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

Jul 07

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.

7 Comments so far »

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?