How to Extend Your Laptop Battery Life

Laptop manufactures have made great improvements over the years, when it comes to battery life, but even the most efficient machines don’t last long enough for most people. What most people don’t realize, however, is that their computer systems are loaded with integrated peripherals and bloatware that they never use, which consumes their battery’s energy. From the CPU to the trackpad, every component of a laptop consumes power from the battery. The amount of power that each component consumes depends on environmental conditions, like temperature and system workload. The more components that are attached to your laptop computer, the faster the battery will drain. Each program, driver, or service that loads, and every electrical circuit that fires up, slowly deteriorates your system’s battery life.

Some of the burden on you system is placed there by the manufacturer and, at times, they can be a bit difficult to track down and remove. But there are some simple and quick fixes for improving battery life, before you dive into the more time-consuming stuff. Keeping your laptop cool, dimming the display and enabling hibernation will all help to maximize your laptop battery’s life. Meanwhile, there are some hardware and software tweaks that can really help to boost the performance of your laptop battery, however, all suggestions should be executed carefully, since a small mistake can cause your laptop to function poorly, or lose functionality all together.

To start, always make a back-up disc in case something goes wrong during any of the processes. Then, on the hardware side of things, make sure that you disable and disconnect unused components and peripherals. It might be possible for you to disable integrated peripherals in your laptop through the system BIOS or through the Device Manager. The preferred method is through the BIOS, if your system allows for it. This will increase the battery life in your laptop a great deal.

On the software side of things, making sure that you are disabling and uninstalling unnecessary services and applications will help minimize the amount of energy you system consumes. For Windows users, in the start menu search field, enter MSCONFIG, and hit enter. After the Windows System Configuration utility starts, click on the "Start-up" tab to see all the programs that start-up along with Windows. The idea is to disable programs that you can start manually when you need them, instead of having the programs automatically start with the OS. Some recommend disabling everything but AV software. Once you’ve finished disabling these programs, you’ll click "apply" and then restart your laptop computer.

Next, go back to your start menu search field and enter: SERVICES.MSC, and then hit the enter button; the Services Management utility will open, and you will see a long list of services that are installed on your system. A large majority of these services are vital to the operating system, and it is recommended that you don’t mess with them. However, if you have a keen eye and the patience to go through them one by one, you are likely to find a few services that can be safely disabled without disrupting your operating system. To disable a service in the utility, double-click on it in the list and a subsequent window will open. In the new window, change the start-up type to "manual."