When you’re out and about with your laptop, you obviously want the battery to last a long as possible. There are many ways to eke out more battery life, and I’m going to list five of them below. You’ll know some of the tips very well, while others are not-so obvious.
We’ll start with the obvious tips first and end with the not-so obvious.
1. If you don’t need Wi-Fi enabled, disable it
The wireless card in your laptop is one of the biggest battery-suckers in your laptop, so whenever you don’t need it, turn it off. This is usually accomplished easily with a quick keystroke (ordinarily Fn+F3 on most laptop keyboards).
For example, if you’re reading a long article on a website, there’s no reason to have the Wi-Fi enabled. Your browser has it cached after the article is loaded in the browser, so go ahead an disable the Wi-Fi until you’re done reading, then re-enable.
2. Dim the screen as much as you possibly can
It used to be the laptop monitor panel was the biggest battery-sucker, but that hasn’t been the case since LED backlight technology. Even so, it’s still a fairly large drain.
Dim the screen as much as your eyes can tolerate while still being able to read what’s on-screen comfortably, and you’ll get more life out of the battery charge.
3. Mute the audio
Every time a sound is played, you’re using power regardless if the sound comes from the internal laptop speaker or if it’s delivered via headphones.
When reading things on-screen and not listening to music or watching a video, mute the audio. This will be available via the mute-audio function key (usually Fn+F8 on most laptops), or just use the “volume down” function until the audio is completely silent, which will be muted mode.
4. Don’t plug in anything USB or SD
If you have a USB mouse or pendrive plugged in, that’s using power. If you have an SD card or other type of Flash memory plugged in, that’s using power. Unplug that stuff.
To note: Some people are under the belief that smaller “laptop size” mice use less power than standard-sized. They don’t. Physical size has nothing to do with the power a mouse consumes.
5. Hibernate, don’t sleep
This one is very easy to understand.
When a laptop is hibernated, it is OFF.
When a laptop is in sleep mode, it’s in reduced-power mode (hence the blinking/pulsing light), so it’s ON.
If the goal is to save as much battery power as possible, always hiberate and don’t put the unit into sleep mode. Yes, it is true that your laptop will take longer to “wake up” out of hibernation compared to sleep, but it’s well worth it to get more life out of the battery charge.
Note: The time to bring a laptop out of sleep/hibernation is greatly reduced if using SSD instead of the older hard disk drive.
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