When you laptop was all shiny and brand new, it would run for hours without needing to plug the charger in. However after a while laptop batteries start to wear down and degrade, which can lower the battery life and run time.
Here are a few things you can do to extend battery life and keep it in a healthy condition for as long as possible.
Use PowerCFG
PowerCFG is a command-line tool which will provide you with a detailed report on the status of your laptop’s health by analysing and observing the laptop’s status.
Type the following in the command-line –
powercfg -energy -output FoldernameFilename.html
If you want to save the report on Desktop as Battery Report, type the following command –
powercfg -energy -output C:Users\rahul\Desktop\Battery-Report.html
You’ll be provided with a detailed report on your Desktop in around 60 seconds. This report will highlight all errors and other information related to the battery.
However, it can be quite overwhelming to try and understand. An alternative is, BatteyInfoView, a freeware tool, which can discover and display the relevant details about your laptops battery.
Defrag regularly
Defragmenting your hard drive not only improves the PC’s efficiency, but it also ensures the longevity of your laptop’s battery life by putting less strain on it. Your PC consumes less energy when the hard drive is defragmented frequently.
You don’t need to download anything for this purpose as the built-in Defragmenter in Windows should be sufficient for this purpose.
Remove or shut down external devices and WiFi when not in use
Attaching wireless and USB devices can drain your battery quickly. Try and remember to shut them down when you are not using them. Also avoid charging your smartphones and tablets through your laptop if it’s not plugged-in.
Don’t keep your laptop battery plugged-in all the time
Contrary to the popular belief, keeping your laptop plugged-in all the time significantly curtails a battery’s life. Ideally, you should let your battery charge to 80% and then drain to about 40%. Don’t let it run down to empty either. This alone could increase the life of a laptop battery as much as 4 times.
Prevent overheating
Overheating issues can be triggered by a number of different factors. The main reason, however, is the dust that gathers around the vents of your computer. Obviously when your laptop gets hotter, the cooling fans have to work harder to keep the temperature down.
This will drain your battery quickly, so it is important to take measures to prevent overheating. In most cases, cleaning off dust and using a cooling pad should do the job, but you should take your laptop to a service centre if any overheating issues persist.
Add more RAM
Adding more RAM to your PC will mean that it won’t have to rely on virtual memory anymore. For those who don’t know, your PC creates virtual memory using some of the hard drive space as primary memory whenever it needs more RAM than what you have installed in your PC. The whole process is battery-consuming.
Avoid multi-tasking
Multi-tasking is not only bad for productivity, but can also drain your battery quicker than usual.
Adjust your PC’s settings for low battery usage
Go to Control Panel >Hardware and Sound >Power Options and tick the ‘Power Saver’ settings.
These settings will save energy wherever possible, but can impact your PC’s performance and speed.
Use Hibernating mode instead of Sleep mode
A PC can resume full-power operations within seconds when you switch your laptop back on from the sleep mode. Hibernate mode, on the other hand, resumes a lot slower than the above mode as it takes some time to copy the data from hard drive back to RAM.
Sleep mode, however, places all the open programs and data in the RAM instead of hard drive. In other words, they are essentially kept alive until you resume your work again. That’s why your PC ‘wakes up’ so quickly when you resume, but this process consumes quite a lot of power. So unless you are going away for a short while, you should always hibernate your laptop.
The above screenshot shows you how to do this in Windows 7.
Use a Cooling Pad
If you do play games or use other heavy programs (like Photoshop for example), you should always have an efficient cooling pad when using your laptop. It’s going to keep your laptop significantly cooler than it would have otherwise been.
You can buy cooling Pads from most computer stores, and electronics retailers.
Place your laptop on a hard-surface
You want the air to be able to circulate freely inside your laptop to prevent damage and overheating. Putting your laptop on a soft surface can block the intake vents which draw the air to cool the components of a laptop case. Avoid placing a laptop on your lap, bed or sofa. Aside from battery damage, you run the risk of damaging other components inside the laptop, especially those placed near the vents.
Put it on a cooling pad or marble for best results.
That’s it! We’ve covered a range of tips to help extend your computer’s battery life. Some of them are quick fixes, others a bit more complex. Rather than trying them all at once we suggest taking things one step at a time.
My personal favourite? The cooling pad. It’s a quick, inexpensive way of keeping your laptop cool and reducing the work the cooling fans have to do. What’s you favourite tip? Let us know in the comments below.
