With the rise in laptop sales it is essential for laptop buyers to make sure they use their laptop batteries to the fullest and also make sure they can achieve the highest performance with the available battery. Generally most laptops claim to have 4-6 hours of battery life but in real it comes to half to the promised backup time because of many factors like heavy usage while on battery backup, running USB based gadgets, CD/DVD ROMs etc. You can also need to make sure about some battery life saving tips because the laptop batteries generally have a life of around 1000 recharge cycles. So here is some tips to increase laptop battery backup in some easy ways.
Defrag regularly : The faster your hard drive its work – less demand you are going to put on the hard drive and your battery. Make your hard drive as efficient as possible by defragging it regularly. (but not while it’s on battery of course!) Mac OSX is better built to handle fragmentation so it may not be very applicable for Apple systems.
Get rid of bloatware : Get rid of all the useless software that comes bundles with laptops. You really don’t need all those monitors, recovery solutions and such, there are far better. Lighter and free data recovery alternative available. All of these programs running in the background not only slow down your computer, but also use up precious processing power which in turn depletes the battery. Even make sure that there are only essential items in startup, you don’t need iTunes , Adobe Updater and stuff to startup with your Laptop.
Dim your screen : Most laptops come with the ability to dim your laptop screen. Some even come with ways to modify CPU and cooling performance. Turn them down to the lowest level you can tolerate to squeeze out some extra battery juice.
Unplug external devices and empty disc drives : External devices like a USB external HDD, an iPod or mouse use power from the laptop to run. Therefore, unplug them so that all the battery power is used just for your laptop. If you want to watch a movie from removable media, copy it to your HDD and unplug the external device. Not only is it faster, that’s one less device using up previous battery power. Similarly, if you’re not using the optical disc drive, remove any discs from it because even if it’s not being read from or written on, the disc keeps spinning and using power.
Avoid multimedia content and using speakers : Gaming or watching HD movies on battery power is not a good idea, it eats your battery really very fast. The graphics card works overtime and requires more power to render graphics or frames in a movie, specially HD ones. As much as possible, mute the sounds as well or use earphone/Headphones while watching a movie.
Turn off connectivity services: When you’re not surfing the internet through WI-FI or transferring data through Bluetooth, turn them off to save battery power. Turning them on or off is just a key press away on modern laptops and shouldn’t be too cumbersome. Both these services require considerable power.
Keep the battery contacts clean : Clean your battery’s metal contacts every couple of months with a cloth moistened with rubbing alcohol. This keeps the transfer of power from you battery more efficient.
Hibernate not standby : Although pacing a laptop in standby mode saves some power and you can instantly resume where you left off, it doesn’t save anywhere as much power as the hibernate function does. Hibernating a PC will actually save your PC’s state as it is, and completely shut itself down.
Update drivers : Although it’s not considered a direct connection, most newer drivers help devices perform more efficiently and thus consume less power. Furthermore, they can even offload processing tasks to specific components and not stress the CPU.
Don’t multitask : Do one thing at a time when you’re on battery. Rather than working on a spreadsheet, letting your email client run in the background and listening to your latest set of MP3’s, set your mind to one thing only. If you don’t you’ll only drain out your batteries before anything gets completed.
After following all this tips I am defiantly sure that your battery backup time will increases much better than before.
