How To Improve
Laptop Battery Life
Anyone with a laptop or tablet PC knows that at the end of
the day, battery life is still the key mobility factor when
using a notebook on the road. Some users might turn to
extended batteries, while others already have one and are
looking to squeeze out handful of minutes before they run
out of juice somewhere. An area that many laptop users
overlook is the software that is running in the background
on many laptops that acts as a leech, sucking away at your
power and making your laptop work harder than it should.
With a few minutes worth of simple changes, you can easily
crank out some more time from your laptop following our
guide.
Most of this guide will target laptop running Windows Vista,
but many of the same tweaks hold true for Windows XP.
Keep your processor working at a walking pace
Most laptops offer power regulation software, and almost all
have the ability to change profiles using the Vista power
manager. Click on that battery icon on the bottom of your
screen, and make sure your laptop is set to Balanced or
Power Saver. High Performance is great if you are encoding
video or playing games, but it makes your processor work
harder than it has to, using more power and throwing out
more heat.
Tune your radio dial
Keep an eye on your wireless devices, and disable them if
they are not in use. If you have your Bluetooth or WiFi
device running at all times, you are using chopping off
useful battery life that could have been used doing
something else.
Change your viewing habits
The biggest power draw on your laptop, especially if it is a
large one, is the screen backlight. While it may look big,
beautiful, and shiny, you are really hurting your battery
performance with the backlight at a high level. Start by
putting the backlight to the lowest setting, and increase it
slowly until you find the lowest setting your find bearable.
Remember that this will vary depending on the room you are
in, meaning you might have it set brighter in an office
setting, but much lower at home at night.
Don't be tempted by movies
If at all possible, stay away from using DVD's or CD's in
your laptop while using battery power. The drive creates a
huge power draw on the system while running. On top of the
drive, your processor is also working hard to decode the
audio and video, sometimes knocking off close to 30% of your
overall battery life. If you must watch movies, try to stick
with digital content that you download or stream online.
iTunes and Hulu.com are excellent alternatives to the evil
discs.
Kill unwanted background activities
Right out of the box, almost all notebooks have the
following processes running in the background, which eat up
precious CPU cycles and trash your hard drive.
Automatic Updates:
While keeping your system up to date is a good thing, this
should be optional to have done at your own leisure. I
prefer to update my system when I don't care about battery
life, or have my system connected to AC power. To disable
this activity, go into your control panel and click on
‘Windows Update". In the next window click on "change
settings" on the left side, and make your way to the next
screen. Now change your selection to "Never check for
updates", and click OK. Please note that this may make your
system vulnerable if you don't manually check for updates on
a regular basis.
Windows Indexing:
Windows disk indexing helps to reduce search times when
trying to find a particular file on your hard drive, but
will wreak havoc on your battery life in the process. To
disable indexing, open "My Computer" and right click on your
hard drive. On the first screen that shows up, uncheck
"Index this drive for faster searching". You will need to
proceed through a few prompts, as well as clicking "ignore
all" if prompted. This may take quite a bit of time
depending on how full your drive is.
Anti-Virus Software:
AV software is a huge performance hog, but also a life saver
depending on what type of sites your visit or what sorts of
files you encounter. I am relatively savvy enough to steer
clear of harmful items in my daily activities, and have yet
to need any AV software for years. Not only can they be a
huge resource hog and bog your machine down, they sap away a
lot of battery life if they start scanning in the
background. Be warned that removing AV software from your
system can be risky, and should be done at your own
discretion. If need more than one hand to count the number
of virus problems you have had in the past, don't follow
this suggestion.
The next step of this guide requires you to use the Task
Scheduler, and disable a few services that your computer
queues up at various times while you are using your
computer. This can be accessed by going into your program
list, then Accessories, then System Tools, finally clicking
Task Scheduler.
In the list of Active Tasks, the following items cause the
most unwanted activity in the background. To disable any of
these items, double click the selection which will take you
to another screen listing more details on that activity. Now
all you need to do is right click the item, and click
disable to stop it from bothering you in the future.
Consolidator:
Runs in the background for the Customer Improvement Program.
Scheduled Defrag:
Defragments your hard drive, and will bog down your system
in the process. I handle this at my own leisure instead of
letting the system schedule it weekly.
Clean up after yourself
Having additional programs working in the background when no
longer in use can reduce system performance and decrease
battery life. If you are done using a certain application,
exit out of it properly instead of just minimizing it to the
background. Also note that some programs drop down into your
taskbar when you click the X at the top right of the screen.
These can usually be killed by right clicking them in the
taskbar, and clicking exit.
By Kevin
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