Six ways to extend your laptop battery life
It's happened to many a traveller: you’re onboard a flight from, say, Vancouver to Toronto, with plans to finish the stack of work tucked into your laptop case. After all, an airplane is often a great place to be productive, thanks to the absence of nagging colleagues, email and ringing phones – providing, of course, the technology you need is in working order at 30,000 feet.
Sometimes, you barely make it over Winnipeg before your computer warns you it's about to "hibernate" as your battery power is at just five percent. Now how exactly do you plan to finish that sales report before you land?
Energy management has been a problem since the earliest days of mobile computing. Thanks to more powerful batteries and processors with better energy management, it’s getting better all the time, though there’s still no magic-bullet solution.
But there are some things you can do aside from lugging a spare battery. The following are a few tips for squeezing more juice out of your laptop:
1. Turn down the brightness of your monitor a great deal as it will help preserve battery life. This can usually be found on your laptop’s secondary keyboard commands (such as blue icons that look like little suns) and then manually reducing the brightness. When you’re near an electrical outlet again - at home, the office or in a hotel – crank the brightness back up, if you like. If you’re shopping for a new laptop, keep in mind the bigger the laptop screen the faster the battery drain, in most cases.
2. The battery will drain faster if there’s a spinning disc in your CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive such as a game, music CD or DVD movie. Some games offer you the choice to install it all to the hard drive, so choose this option as you’ll get more life out of your laptop. Same with music – copy your favourite tunes to the hard drive instead of spinning the CD. While Hollywood cringes at the idea, there are also many programs that can “rip” your movies to the hard drive. Needless-to-say, your laptop battery will last much longer in programs with little drain on system resources, such as a word processor.
3. Make sure you have no devices plugged into the laptop that can be draining its power, such as a Webcam, USB thumb-stick or a wireless PC card. Connected peripherals can be a factor in eating away at battery life, so get used to the touchpad instead of using an external mouse when you’re away from an electrical outlet. Ditto for enabling wireless connectivity, such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, so be sure these radios are turned off when you don’t need them. (They should be turned off in an airplane, anyway!)
4. Windows users can also click on Power Options in the Control Panel (which may be under Performance and Maintenance) to manually reduce the power consumption of your laptop. Some may turn off your monitor when not in use for, say, three minutes, but will turn on instantly again when a key is touched. Also, you can set alarms when the battery is about to die (say, at five percent) so you can safely save your information before powering down. If you’re in the market for a new laptop, the new dual-core processors from Intel are roughly 40 percent faster than their predecessors, yet about 40 percent more energy efficient, resulting in longer battery life.
5. While not cheap, you might want to consider a better battery than the one that shipped with your PC. For example, HP laptops typically ship with a regular six-cell battery that can deliver up to four hours of battery life, depending on the application. But you can choose to buy an eight-cell battery that can last up to 10 hours on a single charge or the current top-of-the-line laptop battery – a 12-cell Smart Lithium-Ion Ultra-Capacity battery – for just under 16 hours of battery life. A 12-cell HP battery costs between $179 and $199; this price is comparable to other laptop manufacturers.
6. This last tip may sound like a no-brainer for air travellers, but you’d be surprised how many times it’s overlooked. If you want to get a jumpstart on your work before taking off, be sure to find an electrical outlet while you’re waiting for your flight at the gate, a restaurant, bar or airline lounge. This way you can juice up your laptop before soaring the friendly skies. Experts used to say you shouldn’t recharge a laptop battery unless it’s fully drained but a quick email to four leading computer manufacturers suggests this is old advice - today’s laptop batteries can be recharged at any time without hurting the longevity of the battery.
It's happened to many a traveller: you’re onboard a flight from, say, Vancouver to Toronto, with plans to finish the stack of work tucked into your laptop case. After all, an airplane is often a great place to be productive, thanks to the absence of nagging colleagues, email and ringing phones – providing, of course, the technology you need is in working order at 30,000 feet.
Sometimes, you barely make it over Winnipeg before your computer warns you it's about to "hibernate" as your battery power is at just five percent. Now how exactly do you plan to finish that sales report before you land?
Energy management has been a problem since the earliest days of mobile computing. Thanks to more powerful batteries and processors with better energy management, it’s getting better all the time, though there’s still no magic-bullet solution.
But there are some things you can do aside from lugging a spare battery. The following are a few tips for squeezing more juice out of your laptop:
1. Turn down the brightness of your monitor a great deal as it will help preserve battery life. This can usually be found on your laptop’s secondary keyboard commands (such as blue icons that look like little suns) and then manually reducing the brightness. When you’re near an electrical outlet again - at home, the office or in a hotel – crank the brightness back up, if you like. If you’re shopping for a new laptop, keep in mind the bigger the laptop screen the faster the battery drain, in most cases.
2. The battery will drain faster if there’s a spinning disc in your CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive such as a game, music CD or DVD movie. Some games offer you the choice to install it all to the hard drive, so choose this option as you’ll get more life out of your laptop. Same with music – copy your favourite tunes to the hard drive instead of spinning the CD. While Hollywood cringes at the idea, there are also many programs that can “rip” your movies to the hard drive. Needless-to-say, your laptop battery will last much longer in programs with little drain on system resources, such as a word processor.
3. Make sure you have no devices plugged into the laptop that can be draining its power, such as a Webcam, USB thumb-stick or a wireless PC card. Connected peripherals can be a factor in eating away at battery life, so get used to the touchpad instead of using an external mouse when you’re away from an electrical outlet. Ditto for enabling wireless connectivity, such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, so be sure these radios are turned off when you don’t need them. (They should be turned off in an airplane, anyway!)
4. Windows users can also click on Power Options in the Control Panel (which may be under Performance and Maintenance) to manually reduce the power consumption of your laptop. Some may turn off your monitor when not in use for, say, three minutes, but will turn on instantly again when a key is touched. Also, you can set alarms when the battery is about to die (say, at five percent) so you can safely save your information before powering down. If you’re in the market for a new laptop, the new dual-core processors from Intel are roughly 40 percent faster than their predecessors, yet about 40 percent more energy efficient, resulting in longer battery life.
5. While not cheap, you might want to consider a better battery than the one that shipped with your PC. For example, HP laptops typically ship with a regular six-cell battery that can deliver up to four hours of battery life, depending on the application. But you can choose to buy an eight-cell battery that can last up to 10 hours on a single charge or the current top-of-the-line laptop battery – a 12-cell Smart Lithium-Ion Ultra-Capacity battery – for just under 16 hours of battery life. A 12-cell HP battery costs between $179 and $199; this price is comparable to other laptop manufacturers.
6. This last tip may sound like a no-brainer for air travellers, but you’d be surprised how many times it’s overlooked. If you want to get a jumpstart on your work before taking off, be sure to find an electrical outlet while you’re waiting for your flight at the gate, a restaurant, bar or airline lounge. This way you can juice up your laptop before soaring the friendly skies. Experts used to say you shouldn’t recharge a laptop battery unless it’s fully drained but a quick email to four leading computer manufacturers suggests this is old advice - today’s laptop batteries can be recharged at any time without hurting the longevity of the battery.
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