Windows Laptops: Tips To Increase Battery-Life

Windows Laptops: Tips To Increase Battery-Life 

Most laptops still doesn't has all-day battery life and here we discuss some ways to squeeze the life of your Windows laptop's battery. The ways wouldn't turn your laptop much stamina to work all day; but they may help without an outlet for a while longer.

1. Reduce Screen Brightness

2. Auto Turn-Off the Display

3. Disable Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and other Hardware Devices

4. Adjust the Power Plan

5. Use Windows Power Trouble-shooter

6. Hibernate the system
 

1. Reduce Screen Brightness: Without doubt, the brightness of screen is the biggest battery drain, whether your device is a laptop, smartphone or tablet. So, reducing screen's brightness is a good way to squeeze little bit more time for battery. Lowering brightness level will enhance battery power longer. To do this press and hold the Function (Fn) key, then press the brightness button on laptop keyboard. And you can also use Windows Mobility Center, from laptop, to adjust screen's brightness; open Windows Mobility Center by pressing Windows Key + X, for Windows 7 and for Windows 8, just launch it from Control Panel (Windows Key + X, opens power user menu).        

2. Auto Turn-Off the Display: If you're going away from laptop for a few minutes or more, then its screen will still be on, which draining the power. So, setting-up laptop's aggressive power settings to dim then turn-off the display, automatically, is a good choice to save battery power, when the laptop is not in use. To enable this option open Power Options dialog from Control Panel then set the display to dim and adjust to turn-off after a short period of time. This is also an easy way to save the power and when moving the mouse or pressing any key the display will be turned back. For media players, set the display to automatically stay on, while they're running.   

3. Disable Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and other Hardware Devices: Bluetooth radio and the laptop even having some devices such as infrared (IR) port are, also, drain the battery power when they're enabled / powered-on. So, they should have to be disabled to save some battery power when they're not in use. To disable Bluetooth, press Function Key (Fn) then press the key, which has Bluetooth symbol on laptop. 

Disabling Wi-Fi is also a good way to save battery power, when you're not using Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi can be turned-off the similar way of using Function Key or disable the adapter of Wi-Fi from Control Panel's network connection window. 

Bluetooth and Wi-Fi could able to identified, whether they're on/off, through the indicators of your laptop.

4. Adjust the Power Plan: Windows offers power plans and through them you can change laptop's power settings to different profiles. If you need every bit of power to be saved then your laptop should be switched to Power Saver mode. Balanced is the default mode, which balances power consumptions on hardware. Power Plan settings can be modified easily and they're hidden in Control Panel's Power Options window.

To modify Advanced power options, click Change plan settings link and choose Change Advanced power settings. Now Power Options window will open and you can change a variety of settings such as power off the hard-drive and even slow down the processor speed rather turning the fan to on, if the processor gets hot. Both of these activities may save power, too.

5. Use Windows Power Trouble-shooter: A tool, Troubleshooting, is included in Windows 7 and 8, through which scan your system for common battery drains and fix them, automatically. To load the tool, Control Panel > Troubleshooting then perform a search for Troubleshooting. 

To launch Power troubleshooter: Troubleshooting > All Categories > Power.

Windows will search for common issues then fix them, automatically. 

It's a technique used to discover the optimal solution to certain problems on Windows laptops. 

6. Hibernate the system: Hibernation is an option, which is similar to sleep mode but saves more power. If you're not going to be using the laptop for a few hours, then switch it into hibernate mode, rather than sleep mode, to conserve more battery power. Hibernate makes the hardware to powered-off, but not like a regular shutdown. A tiny amount of power will be drawn from power supply to keep CMOS to be powered.   

 Here's few general ideas to prevent battery from draining faster:

• Do not use screensavers, as they're unnecessary and not useful. They will drain the battery. 
• Run fewer programs at the background. Just check the system tray for the programs that were running and disable them to prevent as they're automatically running, when the system starts. 
• Reduce CPU usage. Using heavy programs may cause the CPU to work a lot and CPU will take more power then the battery will drain faster. 
• Avoid maxing-out of RAM. When RAM reaches its limitations, then it became heavier and looks for more memory to write the data. So, RAM moves the data to the page-file on system's hard drive, and hard drive's usage will be increased, which may drain the battery, too. This solution is not a problem on modern laptops, as they're coming with excellent capacity of RAM. If your laptop's RAM became full, then try to close some unwanted running programs, which will free-up the RAM or upgrade the RAM. 

Windows Task Manager's Performance tab will reveal more info about the usage of CPU and RAM. 

So, the less your computer has to do; the more power it can save.