Battery life on your laptop

You grab your laptop and turn it on, but it is almost flat, so you dive for a PowerPoint before it dies.

It seems that it doesn’t last very long at all these days. But what can you do.

There are a lot of things that can chew up your battery’s life, and some of them are really simple to reverse.

Check that your screen brightness isn’t set too high when on battery. The power settings on the CPU can be dropped back a bit. Turn off screen savers and just use blank screens, or even turn on Hibernation, or sleep so that it shuts down when you aren’t using it. Also turn it off when putting it in your bag. Even when in sleep mode it can use battery.

Also programs running on the laptop that are not needed can be using up power, so removing them will help a little.

One very effective thing that can be done to both speed up your laptop and save on power, is to replace the Hard Drive with a Solid State Drive. These use less power and make your computer quicker, so a real win win.

Some older batteries would improve if you did a full cycle of the battery a few times, most new batteries don’t have a memory so they don’t need this.

And sometimes it is time to pull the pin on old hardware, new CPU’s, Chipsets and technology are a lot more energy efficient, so it might be time to upgrade.

Even a little longer is better than nothing.