How To Get The Best Laptop Battery Life

Take a look at our top tips for getting the most life out of your notebook off the plug; we review everything from screen brightness to wireless card usage.

Here are some tips to teach you how to  increase your laptop battery life:

1.Reduce Your Screen Brightness

The most notable consumer of power in a notebook computer is the screen. Notebook makers have alleviated this somewhat in recent years by switching from CCFL backlighting units to LED, but the fact remains.
First, here’s how to adjust your screen brightness in Windows 7 and 8/8.1:

• In the system Tray, click the power plug/battery icon
• When the pop-up appears, click More power options
• The next screen will show you the available power plans; the one that’s currently selected will be bolded. Click the Change plan settings link next to it
• Now you’re looking at settings specific to your current power plan. The power plan has different settings depending on whether you’re using AC power or on battery. Move the Adjust plan brightness slider to the desired position for On battery mode and then click the Save changes button to apply your settings.

We suggest you begin by moving the slider all the way to the left (minimum brightness) for the On li-ion laptop battery settings and moving it up bit by bit until it’s comfortable. Remember to keep the brightness as low as you can because even reducing screen brightness by 10 percent can significantly extend how long your notebook lasts unplugged.
One brightness setting will not fit all situations; you may have to increase the brightness in a sunlit room to make the screen usable, for example.

2.Avoid Resource-Intensive Activities
Two other leading consumers of electric power in a notebook computer are the processor (CPU; Central Processing Unit) and the graphics card (GPU; Graphics Processing Unit). The processors and graphics cards used in notebook computers are specially designed to be most efficient at lower power states; they can throttle back their operating frequency (GHz) and voltage to very low levels. They’re only able to do this however when the user is not running strenuous activities that require significant processing power. Strenuous activities include but aren’t limited to the following:

• Photo and video editing
• Playing video games including 3D and Flash/browser-based games
• Playing video, especially HD

The CPU and/or GPU will use more power while performing the activities above. Here are examples of activities that require very little processing power for modern computers:

• Web browsing (standard; non-Flash-based websites)
• Word processing
• Music playback

In other words, try to plan what you’re going to do on your notebook in advance while on battery.