Running laptop for longer hours is one thing any person owning a laptop wants to do but to my surprise when I asked few of my friends on how they keep the battery last for long period, all they said was reduce the monitor brightness or just put the lid down. Honestly that’s not enough.
What drains your laptop battery ?
To find out you need to drop off all the things people have said and find what is consuming your laptop battery. Every machine is different. You have your hardware running like blue tooth, Wifi Finder, Any additional hardware , Background process, wallpaper and many stuff like that.
If you micro analyze you would know that computer uses power for each and every thing thats running even if you are not using it.
Lets take an example of Bluetooth device on your laptop. When at home, we all keep this on so we dont have to worry much about turning it on every time. But even keeping it on consumes power because it always polls for new devices or is always ready to be connected.
Take up your WIFI. You keep it on all the time as you have a WIFI home but when you travel on train , you use Wireless Internet but still keep your Wifi on.
These are certain examples which points out that there are many thing which consumes your battery power. We think of dimming the brightness of monitor which is THE main requirement of using your laptop and we strain our eyes for working longer.
Windows 7 users have a good option
If you already have Windows 7 or planning to buy a brand new copy when it comes out of beta then you have a good news. Windows 7 Battery Performance is much better than its previous legends of OS.
Windows 7 comes with its own power management plan which gives end users option to create a laptop battery power management plan and the micro manage small small features and hardware options which will make sure you save lot of laptop battery power and run it for a longer time.
How to create a Power plan in Windows 7
- Go to Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Power Options
- Look for Create Power Plan on left hand side panel.
- Once you click on this, you will be asked to fill in basic information on Name of the plan, Use settings from previous plan, Display and Sleep mode options.
- Remember the above step is very useful if you want change just few things.
- Now done with this lets find out what more we can do. This will create your power plan and will set it to default.
Settings up Advance Mode of Power Plan
With basic settings created, I would recommend you to set up the advanced mode of Power plan you had just created.
- You will find all the power plans listed when you open Power Options.
- Look for Change Plan Settings option for the plan you would like to change and then click on change advanced power settings.
- This opens up another window which gives you hundreds of options which can help you in saving your battery for longer time.
The options you get are :
- Hard disk
- Desktop background settings
- Wireless Adapter Settings
- Sleep
- USB settings
- Power buttons and lid
- PCI Express
- Processor power management
- Display
- Multimedia settings
- Battery
According to my experience you should give more emphasis on hardware options like Hard Disk, Desktop Background settings, Wireless Adapter Settings, PCI Express and Processor Power Management.
Remember more you save on unnecessary hardware usage or setup like Bluetooth and Wifi Adapter longer you can run the laptop on battery.
So with all these done, Will my battery run for longer period ?
Yes it will but there is another aspect of Power Management which I would cover in my next post and which will actually make you more aware on how you should spend your battery power.
So till then, Create the plan and experiment. Next post I will make sure you do much better.
Index :
- Guide to Save Laptop battery life: Part 1
- Guide to Save Laptop Battery Life : How you use ? Part 2
- Guide to Save Laptop Battery Life : Tools Part 3
Avoid using the Speakers, that too helps.