If your laptop’s battery has been performing poorly lately, or if you want to make your laptop last as long as possible on a single charge, then we can help. We’ve compiled a list of some of the best ways to conserve your laptop’s battery life in order to give you more power at a minimal cost to performance.
Use Windows Power Saver Mode
One of the easiest and most convenient ways to conserve your laptop’s battery life is to use Windows’ own Power Saver mode. This ensures that your laptop enters sleep mode after a defined period of inactivity, or after shutting the case.
You can find this setting by clicking the battery icon in your computer’s system tray. Choose the ‘More Power Options’ setting and click the button next to ‘Power Saver’. You can also fiddle around with the time settings (like how long you want your computer to wait before shutting down) in order to personalize your system even further.
Lower your laptop’s backlight settings
One of the biggest drainers of battery life is your laptop screen. The brighter it is, the faster your battery life will drain away. Fortunately, reducing the backlight brightness is easy: simply hold down the ‘Fn’ key and find the ‘raise’ or ‘lower’ brightness hotkeys on your keyboard. Some laptops have these buttons along the top row of function keys (F1 to F12), while others (like netbooks) may place them near the arrow keys.
Disable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
When your computer is constantly scanning for wireless signals, it can create a heavy drain on your battery. Disabling this setting can add hours onto your battery life, and is best used when you’re in an area where you don’t have access to Wi-Fi. Some laptops even have a single button that disables all incoming and outgoing wireless signals, while others require you to tinker with software settings.
Disable unnecessary processes
The more resources that your system is using, the faster its battery life will drain away. If you’re constantly playing PC games, listening to music, or watching videos, for example, then your laptop battery will drain away faster than if you were just typing out an offline Word document.
To check how much resources each program is using, open up your Windows Task Manager by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete and sort through the processes by memory usage. Take note of which programs suck up a particularly large amount of resources and end any processes that you don’t need.
Reduce your CPU’s performance
While this may seem counterintuitive, many laptops come with far more processor power than you use during average use. If you want to conserve battery life, you can download special CPU throttling programs that reduce the amount of battery power that your CPU drains while maintaining adequate performance. Some computers may even have this throttling feature built-in to the system.
