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Maximize Laptop Battery Life

Before You Buy

  • Check the specs for battery life but also read actual user reviews for a reality check. Specs often read something like “up to X – X hours.” The “up to” covers a lot of ground. “Up to” is standard advertising lingo. They lie.
  • Make sure your battery is fresh—that is buy your laptop from a reputable source with high turnover. Lithium Ion batteries lose approximately 20% of their capacity every year – even just sitting on a shelf.
  • Buy a decent amount of RAM; 2 GBs at least. The less the laptop has to use virtual memory, the less juice is wasted on writing stuff out to disk.

Once You Have Your Laptop

  • If you don’t plan to use the battery for a while, charge it to about 40 percent , remove it and put it in a cool dry place. Do not put it in the fridge or you family will question your drug habits.
  • Don’t completely discharge your battery – it’s not good for lithium ion batteries.
  • Use Power Options in the Control Panel to adjust your power management scheme. Select the Power Savings setting for best battery performance.
  • Use the correct power adapter for your laptop. A mismatch in wattage could cause an overload and damage both your laptop and battery.

Physical Devices

  • Reduce the number of external devices you use – USB devices (including your mouse) use up energy.
  • Disable Wifi if you are not using it. Wifi uses energy simply searching for signal. Many laptops have a manual method (a switch, sometimes a combination of function keys, normally labeled with an icon that looks like a radioactive tower).
  • Dim your screen. Brighter screens use more energy. Usually you will find screen dimmer keys on your function keys, the top row of your keyboard.
  • Single-task. Multi-tasking uses more energy.
  • Skip the CD/DVD drive. Transfer your movies and stuff to the internal hard drive and run them from there.
  • Keep the temperature cool and keep your laptop well-ventilated (look for air vents on your laptop and make sure they aren’t blocked – or dirty).
  • Keep your work area and laptop clean. Dirt and dust in the vents or in the guts of the machine makes your laptop heat up and work harder.
  • Keep the battery contacts clean. Note the metal contacts on your battery and clean them with rubbing alcohol on a soft cloth.
  • Hibernate rather than standby. Standby does save power but Hibernate saves more and will also preserve your PC’s state.

Keep Your Laptop Healthy

  • Don’t load up your laptop with a bunch of programs and plug-ins. Update drivers and programs that may run better and be more energy efficient. Windows 7 comes with a program called Performance Information and Tools and found in the Control Panel. (Or you can click on the Start button and type Performance Information and Tools in the run bar.)

Open the Disk Defragmenter tool. Win 7 automatically defrags on a weekly basis; unfortunately the default time is 1 am on Wednesday morning— time when you or your computer may not be functioning. Change the schedule or manually run the defrag process.

Use the Adjust the Performance and Appearance tool, Advanced Tools and then Select Adjust for Best Performance* radio button. You lose some Aero effects but gain performance.

Use Task Manager and select the Processes tab. You may be surprised to see how many processes/programs are running in the background. These background processes can eat up system resources and may have been inadvertently added to the Startup process.
To disable unnecessary programs from launching at Startup, go to the Start button and type msconfig. Select the *Startup Tab *and uncheck those items that you obviously don’t need to launch when you boot up your computer. If you are not sure, google the item before disabling.

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