your way to an important meeting or
the coffee shop. We've all been there.
There's nothing you can do to stop
your battery drain, but you can do a
lot to slow its inevitable demise.
If you've got a laptop with a really old
battery that drains in a few minutes
after a full charge, there's not much
you can do to make that old thing last
much longer—you'll probably want to
replace the battery before you do
anything else. For everybody else,
these tips can help you keep your
battery working at peak efficiency.
What Drains Your Battery?
In order to help maximize your
battery life, it's important to first
understand what drains the power
from your laptop battery, and in a
modern laptop it's pretty simple—the
LCD panel is the biggest culprit by
far.
Microsoft's Windows 7
Engineering blog has put together a
very useful chart that helps show you
exactly what percentage each
component will drain, which helps us
know where to start when trying to
maximize the battery life.
The one thing this chart doesn't point
out are add-on devices like flash
drives, USB mice, and especially PC
Cards—which are known to kill your
battery very quickly. If you've got an
unpowered hard drive plugged into
your laptop through a USB port, it's
going to drain your battery more
quickly than if you had a powered
one.
Tweak Your Power Plan
Settings
The first thing you'll want to do is
make sure that you have a reasonable
power plan selected for when you're
rolling on battery power. The high
performance plan is always tempting
(you're a high performance user,
after all), but you'll burn through
your battery a lot more quickly, so
select the Power saver or Balanced
plans, and make sure it's set to turn
off the display quickly after
inactivity, since that's the biggest
power drain.
Next, you'll want to dig further into
the Advanced Power Plan settings,
and make sure that the On battery
settings are set to maximize battery
life—change the plan to turn off the
hard disk quickly, use the low-power
mode for your wireless adapter,
processor, and especially your
graphics card. The System cooling
policy setting allows you to specify
whether the laptop will rely on fans
for cooling, or slow the processor
down when the temperature gets out
of hand, and can definitely help your
battery life, though at the cost of some
performance.
Adjust the Screen Brightness
Since we've already shown that the
LCD screen is the biggest drag on
your battery life, the quickest way to
save your battery life is to use your
laptop's hardware buttons to control
the screen brightness—most laptops
require holding down the function
key and using the brightness keys,
and turning it down as far as you can
(while still visible) is a good idea. It
may seem like an obvious choice, but
it's worth emphasizing at the top of
the list for one reason: Of everything
you can tweak to improve your
battery life, this one change alone is
at the top of the list of tweaks that can
dramatically improve your battery
life.
Make sure that your power plan is set
to turn off the display quickly when
your laptop is idle, and don't use any
fancy screensavers that overuse the
graphics capabilities of your laptop.
Many web sites tell you to disable
Aero to squeeze more battery life,
and it's true that you might get a very
small bit of extra life, a couple of
minutes at the very most—you will be
much better off adjusting the screen
brightness and using aggressive
screen blanking settings.
Optimize Your Hardware for
Power Consumption
Does your laptop have a Bluetooth
adapter that you aren't using? What
about IR? Each of these devices
consumes power just by being
enabled, and if you aren't using them,
you may as well disable them to save
a little bit of battery. If you're using
your laptop on the plane, train, or
somewhere without a wireless
hotspot, use the hardware button to
disable the Wi-Fi adapter if you have
one, or just disable it manually in
Control Panel.
Try to avoid using a PC Card adapter,
as they can drain your battery
quickly, and make sure that your USB
devices are set to allow Windows to
shut them off to save power—you can
find the settings in device manager's
Power Management property pane for
the device.
You'll also want to make sure that
your laptop has enough RAM—if
Windows has to constantly thrash the
disk because you don't have enough
RAM to keep everything in memory,
you either should consider upgrading
your RAM or running fewer
applications at once.
