No matter how long your laptop runs on battery power now, you’d probably like to extend that runtime. Here are four key tips we gleaned from our notebook guru.
- Condition the battery
When you purchase your notebook, charge the battery to 100 percent, discharge it completely, and then fully charge it to 100 percent again to help the battery remember exactly how much electrical charge it can hold. From then on, you’ll never need to completely discharge the battery again, but always make sure when charging it that you let it reach 100 percent. Our guru told us to remember to plug in the AC adapter or dock/port replicator whenever you get a chance. Most notebooks will recharge quickly. Here is another tip for your batteries: Keep them cool. Exposure to high temperatures can be a battery’s worst enemy
- Power down the display
You can often yield up to ten minutes of battery life per level of brightness lowered. Lowering the brightness may give you as much as an extra hour of runtime. In addition, lowering the screen resolution and color depth decreases the workload on the GPU, thus extending the battery runtime. Disabling extra features like ClearType fonts and fade effects will cut down on the CPU’s power consumption.
- Turn off unused devices
Many new notebooks provide a hard-wired On/Off switch for the Wi-Fi radio. Beyond that, you should disable the Ethernet adapter, infrared transceiver, and Bluetooth radio if your notebook has one. It was designed for mobile devices, but having Bluetooth enabled actually consumes quite a bit of power.
- Decrease hard drive activity
To minimize the frequency with which your hard disk has to spin up to access data, our notebook guru recommended defragmenting your hard drive regularly. This optimizes the placement of data on the drive so that it can be found more quickly. Beyond that, he advised optimizing Windows paging file, which is an area of the hard drive that serves as virtual memory whenever your RAM is full. Set both the initial and maximum paging file size to 1.5 times the capacity of the installed memory.
- Condition the battery
When you purchase your notebook, charge the battery to 100 percent, discharge it completely, and then fully charge it to 100 percent again to help the battery remember exactly how much electrical charge it can hold. From then on, you’ll never need to completely discharge the battery again, but always make sure when charging it that you let it reach 100 percent. Our guru told us to remember to plug in the AC adapter or dock/port replicator whenever you get a chance. Most notebooks will recharge quickly. Here is another tip for your batteries: Keep them cool. Exposure to high temperatures can be a battery’s worst enemy
- Power down the display
You can often yield up to ten minutes of battery life per level of brightness lowered. Lowering the brightness may give you as much as an extra hour of runtime. In addition, lowering the screen resolution and color depth decreases the workload on the GPU, thus extending the battery runtime. Disabling extra features like ClearType fonts and fade effects will cut down on the CPU’s power consumption.
- Turn off unused devices
Many new notebooks provide a hard-wired On/Off switch for the Wi-Fi radio. Beyond that, you should disable the Ethernet adapter, infrared transceiver, and Bluetooth radio if your notebook has one. It was designed for mobile devices, but having Bluetooth enabled actually consumes quite a bit of power.
- Decrease hard drive activity
To minimize the frequency with which your hard disk has to spin up to access data, our notebook guru recommended defragmenting your hard drive regularly. This optimizes the placement of data on the drive so that it can be found more quickly. Beyond that, he advised optimizing Windows paging file, which is an area of the hard drive that serves as virtual memory whenever your RAM is full. Set both the initial and maximum paging file size to 1.5 times the capacity of the installed memory.
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