First things first, let’s identify what the biggest battery hog is. Could it be your processor? Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radio? Speakers? No, it is in fact your display.
Windows Vista was continually slammed for it’s battery life, so Microsoft have really worked hard on improving it in Windows 7. But to be honest, if you’ve got a really old laptop battery, that sees it’s life draining in just a couple of minutes after its been charged, its probably seen better days and it’s time to invest in a new one. But if your battery is fairly healthy, these tips should extend its life a bit.
Windows 7 has a great power plan control panel built into it, it allows you to quickly adjust your screen brightness and choose a preset power plan. You can access it quickly by pressing Win+ X and this will allow you to change the brightness or select a pre-determined power plan. If you want more advanced options, you can click on the battery icon in your task-bar and go to more power options.
Now here you can change all sorts of things like when you want the display to dim, when to go to sleep mode, your screen brightness for when your laptop is plugged in and unplugged. Once unplugged it will automatically revert to these settings for you.
Of course the most important setting here is to reduce the brightness of your display right down, you will see a dramatic improvement in your battery life if you do this.
But there’s more settings that we can play around with. If you go to change advanced power plan settings you can change things like your processor speed,system cooling and set what your power button does as well as many more settings.
Play around with these and set things like the harddrive to turn off quickly, the wireless adapter into low power mode and reduce your processors maximum state. Some systems will have a “System Cooling Policy” and this will allow you to select whether or not you want your system to cool with fans, or to let it cool naturally and reduce processor power to prevent it from getting to hot.
Play around with all these settings, they’re fairly simple and straight forward and you should know how to optimize for the best battery performance.
Another big drainer on the battery is your wireless and Bluetooth radios. These use a fair bit of battery life, particularly Wi-Fi. Even when your not connected to a network, it’s constantly scanning and looking for one to connect to. If you’re just typing a word document or something, and don’t need Wi-Fi, be sure to turn off your wireless.
Some laptops have a switch for this, others have a keyboard shortcut, but you can also do it via your Control Panel.
An important thing to remember is kill any unnecessary programs and process that may be running in the background. You’ll find with more and more programs these days, just because you “X” out of them, doesn’t mean their closed. If you go to your system tray notification area, you will often find their icon, which means they’re still up and running. Right click and exit these to make sure they’ve closed. Of course you can also go to your task manager Ctrl+Alt+Delete and have a look at what’s going on there as well.
If your system is low on RAM, and your running a couple of programs, your machine will have to keep switching around programs from your harddrive, which causes unnecessary usage of it, therefore using more power, so make sure you have plenty of RAM, it’s not that expensive to get hold of these days anyway.
So there’s a couple of tips that if you follow, will definitly result in better battery life.
Have you any more suggestions to add? Let me know in the comments
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