How to Improve Laptop Battery Life

Batteries don’t last forever. Like everything except diamonds and viral tweets, they eventually wear out. But with proper care, a laptop battery can still carry a sufficient charge. Here I will show you some tips about how to improve laptop battery life.

Reduce Screen Brightness

The biggest battery drain on any modern portable electronic device is the display. Reducing your screen’s brightness is a simple way to squeeze significantly more time from your laptop’s battery. On a typical laptop, you need to find the Function (Fn) key and press the brightness buttons on your laptop keyboard. The lower the brightness level, the longer you can use your laptop on battery power.

Hibernate Instead of Sleep

When your laptop goes to sleep, it uses a small amount of power to power its RAM and keep its system state loaded in memory, allowing it to wake up and resume in just a few seconds. When your laptop hibernates, it saves its system state to disk and powers off, using almost no power. If you’re not going to be using your laptop for a few hours, place it into hibernate mode rather than sleep mode to conserve even more battery power.

Don’t fully charge your laptop

Wikipedia points out that if your lithium battery is fully charged all the time, you will lose up to 20% of your capacity every year, no matter what you do. Make sure to discharge the battery sometimes, and if you spend most of your time plugged in at a desk, you would be better off running the battery down to half. Meanwhile, keeping the coolness of laptop can also lengthen the battery life. You should ensure that the laptop is not being heated when charging.

Kill Background Processes and Services

Runaway system processes can do more than just kill your PC’s performance—they can kill your battery as well. You need to ensure that any background applications that needn’t to be running are closed while you are on battery power, and disable any automated updaters, scheduled tasks, and especially search indexing.

Get a second battery

Since battery capacity is limited and doomed to be used up, why not invest in a spare battery? They’re available for many laptops, and you might even find that your laptop can accept a higher-capacity than was supplied originally. However, if your laptop doesn’t have a removable battery then consider buying a universal laptop battery that comes with a variety of ‘tips’ to suit just about any laptop. When you connect it to your laptop’s power socket the internal battery runs low. The external battery will charge the internal battery or, if you remove the internal battery, power the laptop directly.
To sum up, to improve laptop battery life, the best way is to achieve power saving as possible. If you need to keep your laptop working when charging is not available, preparing a second battery for backup is sensible.