This situation is familiar to all of us here. You are working on an important PowerPoint presentation or having lots of fun playing games on your laptop, and the “low battery” warning goes off. It’s no big deal if you’re near a power point (no pun intended), but in this scenario, there’s none nearby. Sorry, you’re out of luck. The only thing you can do is to sit there helplessly, watching your battery level go lower and lower until your laptop finally hibernates…
All good things come to an end. That includes your laptop’s battery life. However, there are ways of maximizing the juice from your laptop’s battery. Sure, there is only so much juice that the battery can provide. But the way you use the juice determines how long it will last. Read on to find out how to maximize your laptop battery’s life.
Reduce screen brightness:
Let’s start with the basics. We are going to use one of the ways manufacturers determine a laptop’s advertised battery life because indeed, reducing the brightness of the screen increases your battery life. Depending on the degree of brightness reduced, your battery life can increase by many times. This is because less power needs to be drawn from the battery when the screen is dimmer, hence increasing battery life.
Turn off unnecessary components:
When you’re not using things such as Wi-Fi, turn the Wi-Fi adapter off. Wi-Fi is the biggest killer of battery life. Laptop battery life can be increased significantly by pressing the “Wi-Fi On/Off” button. This also applies to Bluetooth. Again, another way the manufacturers determine the advertised battery life. On ASUS laptops where you can switch between integrated and discreet graphics, choose the integrated graphics option. The reason this extends battery life is because additional power is needed to power the discrete graphics card, which is a separate component from the CPU, whereas the integrated graphics card is part of the CPU. That said, if you’re watching high definition video you’ll definitely want the discrete graphics. After all, who wants stuttering video?
Tweak your power plan settings:
You probably know of the power plans for your laptop battery. By default, Windows includes three of them. These include Power Saving, Balanced and High Performance. Naturally Power Saving mode gives you the most battery life out of these 3 power plans. In most cases however, the battery life increase from switching to Power Saving mode is not a lot. However, there are things you can do to make the effect last longer. This is where the advanced power options come in.
You can access these advanced power options by clicking on the battery icon in the taskbar, and clicking more power options.
Click on “Change Plan Settings”. After that, you will be brought to screens where you can configure the advanced power settings.
Turning off the hard disk is a great way to conserve power.
You can also try limiting the maximum processor state. Obviously, the lesser the maximum processor state, the less battery will be used. Be careful not to set it too low however, you don’t want to reduce performance by too much.
Explore the other options you can modify, modifying these options can help to extend your battery life.
Close unnecessary programs:
Ah, unnecessary programs….something which all of us run. As I write, I have some unnecessary programs open. Although most of these programs do not take up a lot of system resources, it still helps to close programs that you don’t really need that are open. Every program closed counts. Doing this will free up system resources, and reduce CPU load, resulting in less power needed to run your laptop.
Don’t keep your laptop attached to a power outlet 24/7:
It is a common misconception that it is beneficial for laptop batteries to be plugged into power outlets always. And by always, this means 24/7. Don’t do that – it actually is bad for battery life. Charge the battery up to 100%, and then unplug it. This is better in the long run, the cells of the battery will not have their capacity reduced. An alternative is to remove the battery and plug in the laptop. That way, your laptop is on AC power, and this won’t drain the battery.
Undervolt your laptop:
Now, it must be clear that undervolting does not reduce your laptop’s performance. That’s underclocking. Undervolting benefits the laptop in many ways. Longer laptop life, cooler systems, and of course, longer battery life. The benefits easily outweigh the risks. The worst thing that can happen to your computer as a result of undervolting is that you get a BSOD, and the computer restarts. No one’s computer has died as a result of undervolting.
To undervolt, a program called RMClock is needed. It can be downloaded here: http://cpu.rightmark.org/products/rmclock.shtml
Once you’ve downloaded and installed RMclock, go into the Profiles setting. Then set up the current profile (maybe startup?) to “performance on demand”. After that, go under the Performance on demand profile page, then check “Use P-State transitions”. Return to the main page, and undervolt to the lowest possible voltage on the lists. Try testing them for stability. If you get a BSOD, increase the voltage. Continue testing until you get it. You’re then on your way to increased battery life and a cooler laptop.
Underclock your laptop:
This should only be used as a last resort, because it can reduce your laptop’s performance dramatically. Just as you can overclock a laptop to increase its performance levels, you can also underclock to reduce performance (and increase battery life). There are different ways to underclock a laptop. Sometimes, you can underclock via BIOS, but sometimes you will need to use a program such as SetFSB. How to use SetFSB is beyond the scope of this article (it’s pretty complicated), you may want to use Google to search for instructions for your particular model as different laptops use different clock generators.
Final words:
We have given you some tips on how to increase your laptop’s battery life. These tips can help a lot, and can increase battery life significantly if used properly if done right. Not that it’s hard. Normally, the application of one or two of these tips will do. However, the best thing you can do for battery life is to choose laptops with many hours of battery life. Most of the Consumer Ultra Low Voltage (CULV) laptops are good for this purpose. We’ll cover this in one of our upcoming articles. But of course, if you kill a laptop by using many applications at one time and do lots of tasks that require a lot of power, you’re obviously going to get less battery life. How long a laptop computer lasts on battery largely depends on the owner. You may be surprised at how much battery life you can get by simply changing the way you use the laptop to one that doesn’t use up so much resources. It’s worth a try.