How to Make Your Laptop Battery Last Longer

Introduction
There is nothing like giving a presentation to a client, or being on an airplane and seeing a low battery warning on your laptop. Cue the groans as the realization hits that there are no power outlets nearby. As convenient as portable computing is, it still depends on batteries. Laptops themselves seem to be evolving on par with computers in general, but battery technology always seem to lag behind.

The average battery life for a standard laptop is around three hours. There are ways you can extend battery life and maximize time between charges as much as is feasibly possible. A balance has to be struck between saving battery and retaining the usability of the laptop, and the following tips will help you do just that.

Most laptop users will have trawled through the internet in search of hints and tips on how to preserve battery life and found many useful little tweaks they can use. Then not bother to use them as it seems too fiddly to cut processes, close ports and turn devices off each time they need the battery to last. It doesn’t have to be that difficult, one configuration session will save you lots of time - and battery power - in the long run.

Bar none, the most effective saving method is to dim the screen. Nothing sucks power like LCD displays, and by dimming the screen as much as you can the power drain on the battery will reduce significantly. Each laptop has this option either via a function key or Control Panel in Windows.

Windows users have the advantage here, as you can set Hardware Profiles. You can find this under System Properties in the Control Panel. There should already be a profile active and the option to copy it should be available. Copy it and name it something meaningful and ensure the ‘This is a portable Computer’ option is checked along with the ‘Undocked’ option.

Once booted into this profile, the real changes can be made through Device Manager. Here all the extraneous hardware can be turned off like Bluetooth, IR devices, Wireless etc. Anything that won’t be needed while using the machine. You should see an option as to which profile to use every time you boot the machine. This will prevent you having to fiddle with settings and disable hardware each time battery life is an issue.

Also, don’t forget Windows built in Power Options. This is a quick-fire way to reduce the consumption, and preserve battery life. Ensure that the times before the hard drive is turned off, or the screensaver activates is reasonable and that Hibernation is enabled. Vista has an extra option in Power Options, called ‘Power Saver’ which will minimize as much as possible in order to preserve power.

Not using peripherals such as USB mice or media drives will also save you a significant amount of power. Removing CDs/DVDs from a drive will also avoid the need to spin it up. A good tip if you need music or a movie while on the move is to rip the media onto the hard drive using one of the many free ripping tools available.

Lastly, and not for the faint hearted is the Task Manager. Pressing Ctrl, Shift and Escape together will call it up. It will display all the processes currently running on the machine. Identify which ones aren’t needed at the time and right click to stop them. A little research and preparation will be needed here in order to recognize which services you can safely stop, but it is worth your time if you are an advanced user.

The bottom line is that the less work a laptop has to do, the less battery power it will need. Minimizing this workload as much as possible will help you squeeze the most life out of any laptop battery.