There is nothing more frustrating than running out of juice on a laptop while on the move. It comes as no surprise that laptops lose their allure rather quickly when you are constantly on the lookout for a power source where ever you are on the go.

This is one scenario that every notebook owner has to face. This post might help you reduce your laptop power consumption and increase its life.  Although there are a multitude of applications available online that claim to enhance laptop battery life, most are gimmickry – some going as far as to state a 200 percent increase in battery life.  Of course this is far from the truth. Examples of these software’s are Dachshund Software’s Battery Doubler and Notebook Hardware Control. Sire, you can purchase extended battery packs, but by applying some basic changes you could crank up some more battery life.

Using Profiles

One of the most effective ways is of optimizing your battery life is to use profiles. What I mean is that you stop the use of hardware devices that you don’t need saving chunks of battery life. For e.g. If you are in a flight you can safely disable your modem, network adapter, unused USB ports, 1394 FireWire devices,  card reader, wireless and even your DVD drive to get the most of your laptop’s battery.

To configure on the Windows XP for such scenarios, right-click ‘My Computer’, select ‘Properties’ and click the ‘Hardware’ tab, followed by ‘Hardware Profiles’. To create a new profile, click ‘Copy’, type a name for the new hardware profile and click OK.

Next, restart and from the list that appears during the start-up, select the newly created profile. This lets the computer use the newly created profile as the current profile and now you can proceed with customizing it, which is done by enabling and disabling devices in the hardware manager console.

PowerSeize

Prudent use of the power management can help in squeeze out several minutes too. To access these, from ‘Control Panel’, select ‘Power Options’ (or enter ‘powercfg.cpl’ in the ‘Run’ dialog box and click ‘OK’). In ‘Power Schemes’, first ensure you’ve selected ‘Portable/Laptop’. Most laptops offer two modes – ‘Standby’ and ‘Hibernate’- to preserve battery power while retailing the ability to resume in the shortest periods of time. ‘Standby’ works by switching your laptop to a low-power state by powering up again; you can quickly resume all your activities. However, everything saved in the memory is not saved to the disk. On the other hand, ‘Hibernate’ works by saving your computer’s state in the hard drive before shutting down. Although it takes a bit longer than ‘Standby’, unlike the latter, it doesn’t consume any power during hibernation and is perfect for shutting down your laptop if you are away for a few hours.

To enable hibernation simply click the ‘Hibernate’ tab and check the box that says ‘Enable Hibernation’.

Dimmer Display

One of the biggest power drains on your laptop is its display brightness to a lower level; you can substantially increase battery runtime. To configure the display, start by putting the display brightness to the lowest option, and increase it one at a time until you find the lowest settings you’re comfortable with. Try reading text just to make sure. Other ways, such as lowering the screen resolution and color dept can help too.

Keep it clean

Every few months, disconnect your laptop battery and wipe the contact with a cloth and alcohol-based cleanser to ensure optimal power transmission between the laptop and battery. Also, clean out any grit that may have accumulated on the laptop underside, especially near the vents, as dust can clog the cooling fan and overheat the laptop.

Spin down the drive

Another handy, but often neglected, tip involves regularly defragmenting your laptop’s hard drive. The Windows Disk Defragmentation process basically optimizes the placement of all your data thus when you load an application is loads faster and lowers the tax on the battery. More spinning means more consumption.

Unused applications

Having a lot of startup applications drains down the battery life. To disable ant extraneous programs that you may have at start-up, click ‘Run’ and type in ‘msconfig’. In the window that appears click ‘Startup’ tab and clear the checks on unnecessary applications.

More memory

Adding more memory to your laptop especially (if you run memory-intensive programs) helps saves power by reducing your system’s reliance on the virtual memory file on your hard disk. Virtual memory results in the hard drive use, and is much less power efficient than RAM.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!