Photo by Roger H. Goun

After using my laptop solid for a number of days now (sorry other half), I have been in a couple of situations where battery longevity has become critical. There are some obvious ways to save battery life like not scanning with your virus checker or doing other intensive tasks like video editing, but some are not so obvious.

First of all Hardware, you need to be using the smallest amount of peripherals as possible. If you can, switch off Wi-Fi, IR and Bluetooth. Use the trackpad on your laptop rather than an external usb mouse and unplug any other power hungry usb devices (external hard drives for example).

Another good tip is to not watch dvd’s using the dvd drive (same goes for listening to albums). Try and burn films to the hard drive if possible using the guide from lifehacker.com here.

It’s also a good idea to reduce your LCD’s Brightness on the road, this can usually be achieved via a function on your laptop.

Software wise make sure you are using the powersaving features built in to windows, go to the windows mobility centre and also look at power options in the control panel to adjust your settings as required. Mobility centre allows you to adjust various settings on the fly whilst Power Options sets up how you would like windows to save power in different scenarios (plugged in / battery).

Another tip that has been doing the rounds is to disable the aero interface of windows vista. In the artcle here by Techreport.com they argue that it only costs around 1watt of battery power to run which may not make that much of a difference.

It could be wise to switch off the windows sidebar however, as if it has a number of mini apps running in it they can consume a little undesired processor power.

Culling the number of running processes to the bare minimum is definitely a good idea as your cpu is a heavy power drain within a laptop. To lower the number of processes that start with windows you can use the inbuilt msconfig.exe tool or use a tool such as Ccleaner – see this post for more on ccleaner.

Two more quick tips are to keep the laptop cool – no fans burning energy trying to cool the laptop, and to take the battery out when using the mains. This second tip should lengthen the life of your battery as you are not constantly charging it.

Happy mobile computing!

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