I have seen a lot of articles floating around about ways to extend your laptop’s battery life. Even with improving technologies and longer lasting batteries, it is still a pain in the butt having your laptop with a dead battery, in the middle of a 8 hour flight. Below are the best articles I have seen on how to squeeze every second of juice from your lappy’s battery. If you don’t want to read all those, these 5 tips just about sum them up.
1. Dim your laptop screen as low as you can. Most laptops come with this function.
2. Use Windows’ built-in power-saving modes. They regulate cooling and CPU activity, and can greatly increase batter life.
3. Turn off all non-essential processes, such as Limewire, your printer suite, and anything else you won’t be using on the road. All of these suck your battery’s juice, so turn them off if you won’t be using them immediately.
4. Don’t try to do anything CPU-intensive such as compiling a video, using photoshop, or running an anti-virus scan while you aren’t hooked up. These activities drastically reduce battery life.
BLABLA
5. Use the Hibernate function whenever you won’t be accessing your laptop for 1 hour or more. Hibernate copies your RAM to your hard-drive, and then shuts itself off.
Top 15 Ways to Extend your Laptop’s Battery Life [Friedbeef's Tech]
10 Ways to Extend Laptop Battery Life [Lifehack.org]
Five Tips for Bettery Notebook Battery Life [LaptopMag.com]
4 Tips to Extend the Life of your Laptop Battery [Microsoft.com]
A Great App to track your Battery Usage [BatteryMon]
Update: Andrew has a great list of ways to store all types of batteries over at his site. I like the one about storing your laptop battery at 40% in your refrigerator.
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Thanks for the great tips. We’re all in need of handy reminders like this.
I wrote an article a while back on long-term battery life issues & how to store spare batteries: Get More Life From Your Rechargeable Batteries
[...] read more | digg story [...]
I’m seeing about 15mins more life with these tips. Not much in absolute terms, but enough to delay my annoyance until I get my next cup of coffee.
The bottom line of it all is to conserve.In doing this, you save time. At the same time you are helping to save our environment too:)
I will try some of these tips out. My batteries dont last more then a year. I was told that the Siemens batteries are known to not last. Anyone know if this is not true.
These are great tips that can actually conserve power for our laptop. But it’s best to always prepare a backup battery
Being on the road a lot I am very conscious of my laptop’s battery life. These are great suggestions. I know battery life gets worse on the computer gets older. What is the life expectancy of a laptop battery? Is Marketing man right that a year is all that a battery lasts?
good tips to improve laptops battery..
this is one way to improve the life of the laptops batteries.. check out for more information.
Interesting article. I’ll test these suggestions. Been mad at HP for the very low battery life.
i’m gonna try it, mine is never longer than an hour
Great tips,but it’s best to always prepare a backup battery and be ready for the worse.
You can also repair your dead batteries instead of buy a new one usually it just one of the cells inside has shorted just replace the one bad cell instead of the whole pack
No wonder why mine just doesn’t last longer than 45 minutes, my laptop is just full of unknown processes and I think my brother is the one behind all this.
Good advice. My battery always seems to go when I most need it. As I travel quite a lot I always try and charge my battery when I hanging around the airport. This way when I arive at my destination meeting I do not have the embarrassment of having a dead laptop!
Worrying about conserving laptop battery life could be a thing of the past with the development of a battery that can charge in seconds, promising a revolution in power storage that could also help green cars and renewable energy.
See Breakthrough battery can charge up in seconds
Can I add one more to it here. Through my personal experience I have found that over charging or leaving your laptop connected to a power socket sometimes results in demaging your battery cells, also if you let you battery run out every few days and charge it back to full will help your battery last longer
And make sure your 3G modem is not attached and operational either! My trusty old HP laptop has never had much of a battery life, 45mins - 1hour max, and paying attention to things like this has enabled me to extract that critical last 5 minutes of computer time when I really needed it the most.
Good tips for improve battery life of laptop. I’ll use these tips for improve my laptop battery life. Thanks.
this is a good tips to improve laptop battery life, i will try those tips on my laptops
Battery life is really important; especially if you are going to hop around from class to class with your computer. I love the hibernate function though, I use it all of the time .. on the go.
-Kevin
Good advise for improve laptop battery life. Thanks for share helpful information.
I just saw a post about the new Nokia notebook/netbook that is about to be launched. You’re looking at 12 hours of battery life! Now put that in your pipe and smoke it!
My gateway only lasted about an hour when it was new when not plugged in ( which is pretty bad I think ). Now it last about 5 minutes when not plugged in.
Great tips! Not sure about the stand-by vs hibernation. I’ve left my laptop [IBM T60] on standby for 2 weeks and when I fired it up, I had 98% battery remaining. Hibernation has always been flaky at best. I’ve lost more work due to hibernation over the year than I care to remember…I say, Standby is the way to go!
great information, i will implement this to my laptop to improve its battery life.
thanks for the tips, i recommend also that you should buy a backup battery always, in case of emergency for your laptop
Here is another battery saving tip… don’t plug your laptop into just any outlet you see… I plugged my laptop into an outlet provided by the Amtrak train, I didn’t know the outlet that well, and apparently it pretty much killed my batteries ability to store energy, so… yeah now I have laptop that will only run via the power chord, lol.
Till then,
Jean
Good tips to improve laptops battery life. I’ll test these suggestions for improve my laptop battery life.
My batteries dont last more then a year. I was told that the Siemens batteries are known to not last. Anyone know if this is not true.
Hi, Thanks for sharing these tips. Also should the laptop be kept on power source always so that it does not drain any battery, or should I always take the power cord off when laptop is fully charged and let it drain and then put the charge back. I really dont know which would be the best way to keep the laptop battery long life. In a few months time my laptop battery is down 15 min. Its Dell 1425.
OK, the tips are really useful! Thanks for them! Hope my battery will last longer from now on.Hibernation has always been flaky at best. I’ve lost more work due to hibernation over the year than I care to remember…I say, Standby is the way to go!
These are really helpful tips, especially for someone who is on campus a lot, and away from a charger. I really need to remember to dim the screen on my computer since it is a huge power-waster.
Re-hashing is for breakfast, sometimes you need something a little meatier in you blog posts, its one of the reasons I keep coming back.
The battery tends to die faster if you keep it charged for a long period of time even after its done charging. wall outlets do not know when to stop charging.
Now when I turn it on the icon tells me that 2:09 hours are left with only 7% of the battery remaining. Is this a malfunction or did something magically lengthen my battery life?
I applied some of these tips to my laptop since I bring it to campus everyday. It definitely works. Thanks for the tips.
I desperately need to put these tips into action, I find myself with a dead laptop way to often when I am on campus. Thanks!
Yes about every other week take it off the charger and let it almost die then plug it back in and that should help your battery life, its worked for my laptop.
everything is fine but can anybody tell me that..can i put my laptop on charging at every time…?
I guess the newer batteries can be loaded anytime and anywhere. I have problems with that so thank you very much for posting this article. Good tips i’m gonna use for sure.
It’s better if you use an UPS. The battery acts as an UPS for a laptop and protects it from voltage fluctuations. I am sure you wouldn’t want your components to get damaged in any way…
I am doing exactly what you said I should so no wonder my battery dies very fast. I didn’t realize all that things matters but now when I think about it it seems reasonable. I’ll try to change my habits and save my batteries life.
This is a very exhaustive tips,so very thank you.
I have seen on how to squeeze every second of juice from your lappy’s battery…