Short-Term Battery-Stretching Strategies
If you're in a tough spot right now, there are things you can do to extend the
battery life immediately. None of these actions will actually increase the
amount of power left in the battery, but instead will reduce the amount of
power the laptop is using, letting you squeeze in a few more precious minutes
before the battery goes kaput. The name of the game in these instances is power
consumption, and you need to reduce yours to as little as possible.
1. Activate
Your Laptop's Battery Saver Mode or Eco Mode
Designed with these sorts of circumstances in mind, most Battery-Saver or Eco
modes will engage a number of automatic changes to lengthen usable battery
life—many of the same changes we'll be making here. This saved profile will
adjust your laptop's settings and shift components into low-power states to
help you ration your remaining juice a bit longer.
Once you've turned on the automatic battery-saver tool,
there are still plenty of steps to take to eke out even better efficiency. This
is done by turning off unnecessary devices, adjusting settings to reduce power
consumption, shutting down unwanted apps and processes, and adjusting your
activities to use less power.
2. Disable Unused Devices and Ports
The easiest way to reduce power consumption is to simply turn stuff off. Every
component in your laptop needs power to function, but that doesn't mean you
need to power all of those components all the time. Start by disconnecting any
unneeded peripherals (like a USB mouse or external drive) and turning off the
biggest power hogs, like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios, graphics processors, and
unused optical drives.
WARNING: Before disabling any component or device, stop and
make sure that this device is not in use, and that it is not essential to continuing
operation of the laptop. For example, you DO NOT want to disable the hard drive
that houses the operating system, or the processor the runs the entire laptop.
Only disable those devices you are comfortable turning off.
To disable unused devices on a Windows system, open up your
system's Control Panel and find the Device Manager. In the Device Manager,
individual components are grouped by category. For example, Network Adapters
will often include both the LAN adapter, which provides Ethernet connectivity,
and Wi-Fi, for wireless networking. The four standard candidates for
saving power are the graphics card (found under Display Adapters), the optical
drive (found under DVD/CD-ROM Drives), and the Ethernet and Wi-Fi adapters
(under Network Adapters). Find the device you want to shut down within the
relevant category. Right click on the device name, and select
"Disable" from the drop down menu.
While you're in the Device Manager, you can also turn off
any unused ports. Just like an extension cord left plugged into an outlet,
these unused plugs still have power going through them, and losing some in the
process. The actual impact on battery life will be minimal, but if you need to
eke out another minute or two of life, this will help. Take a quick glance at your
ports, and turn off anything that's not being used, like USB ports with nothing
connected to them.
While you can disable USB ports on a Mac using the
terminal program, it's something that IT administrators would use to lock down
Macs for security purposes. We don't recommend doing it as an end user because
it may make your system act up. You can, however, disable Bluetooth and Wi-Fi
from the Menu bar at the top of the screen.
3. Adjust Your Settings
While you'll still have to use the display and the keyboard, you can adjust the
settings for each to reduce power consumption. One often overlooked power drain
is keyboard backlighting. Unless you're in the dark, and need the backlight
just to make out each key, turn the backlight off entirely. You can typically
assign a hotkey for this function.
The next power drain is your screen. While you need to keep
the up and running to use the laptop, you don't necessarily need it running at
100-percent brightness or full resolution. Many laptops will have hotkeys
for increasing and decreasing the screen brightness, but if not, it can be
adjusted in the control panel. Reducing the display to 50 percent when you're
running on battery power can add a significant amount of time.
Additionally, if you're simply typing up a document, you
don't need all of the detail offered by a 1080p or higher display. Dialing down
the screen resolution to a basic 1,366-by-768 resolution or lower reduces the
amount of power used in graphics processing without negatively impacting your
ability to work, letting your laptop a bit longer than at full resolution.
Finally, turn off or turn down the sound. If you need to
hear, drop the sound down as low as you can, and consider switching from the
laptop's larger speakers to a set of tiny earbuds to get the audio piped right
to your ears. Whenever possible, just mute the laptop altogether. That way, the
speakers won't be getting any power, and you'll buy yourself some more precious
time.
4. Turn Off Apps and Processes
It's not just the hardware that's stealing your battery juice. Multiple apps
and processes running on your system will also chew through battery life more
quickly. As with the hardware, start by turning off anything that isn't being
used.
In Windows, start by taking a look in your System Tray, the
collection of icons in the lower right corner of the desktop, next to the
clock. On the left end of the System Tray, select the icon to display hidden
icons. Take note of which apps are running in the background.
Open up the Task Manager by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc, or use
Ctrl+Alt+Del and select Task Manager from the menu. Once in the Task Manager,
look at the open apps—you may find that a program or two have been left
running simply because you forgot to close a window instead of minimizing it.
Next, go to the Processes tab. This shows you what processes
are currently running on your machine. While some of these are needed, some,
like those associated with music and video players or cloud storage services
(like Dropbox or Google Drive) can be disabled without causing any problems.
For MacBooks, the process is a little different. Take a look
at System Preferences > Users&Groups for a menu called Login Items.
Delete any power-hungry programs that you don't need anymore, or disable things
like Google Chrome's automatic launch at startup. You can also see programs
that are using a lot of power at any given moment by holding down the Option
key, then clicking on the battery indicator in the Menu bar. Alternately, you
can open the Activity Monitor utility to see a list of all the programs and
processes you currently have open , and which of these are using the most
power. You can stop these processes by selecting the program and then clicking
the Stop icon. Power Nap is an Apple OS X feature that checks your email and
twitter feeds for activity while the system is asleep. If you are trying to
maximize battery life, it would be wise to turn that feature off.
5. Simplify
You can also stretch your battery life by simplifying your own activities.
Multitasking is nice when you have full power, but running several programs at
once puts a greater load on the processor and draws more power. Adjust your
computer use by sticking to one application at a time and avoiding
resource-intensive programs.
Start by single-tasking—if you need to type up a document,
close any additional programs. You'll get longer battery life by not running
Spotify in the background. If you need to keep some tunes going, switch from
streaming media to locally stored songs—you'll still be using some extra power
to play them, but streaming media over Wi-Fi also uses the laptop's wireless
radio.
You might also benefit from switching to simpler tools for
the same tasks, like opting for a simple text file instead of a Word document.
With fewer features and none of Word's automatic actions (like Spell Check and
Autosave), you can do all the writing you need without using quite so much
power. Some activities you'll want to avoid entirely, like photo and video
editing tools, which place a significant load on the processor and graphics
card, and are real power hogs.
By eliminating unnecessary power uses, you should be able to
extend the life of your battery in those moments that you find yourself high
and dry.
Long-Term Strategies
These tweaks will help turn your system into a lean, mean energy-efficient
machine, adding to both the useful time you get out of a single charge, and
extending the overall lifespan of the battery.
6. Care and Feeding of Batteries
It starts with taking care of the battery itself. If your system has a
removable battery, take care not to damage the battery contacts—they connect
the laptop to the battery, and if the contacts get dirty or damaged, it can
reduce and disrupt the flow of power. You can clean the contacts off
with a cotton swab and rubbing alcohol, but damaged contacts might need to be
professionally repaired. This doesn't apply to laptops that seal the
battery into the chassis.
You may have heard old tips about charging your battery to
only 80 percent, and not leaving it on the charger all the time, but most of
that advice is outdated, and applies to older nickel metal hydride batteries
but not the lithium-ion and lithium-polymer batteries used today. While modern
laptop batteries don't require you to be as conscientious about how and when
you charge your battery, you should occasionally take the opportunity to let
the battery drain completely through normal use.
Finally, keep things cool. Heat will shorten the long-term
life of the battery, so take steps to provide optimal airflow and cooling. The
biggest problems come from physical obstruction of the ventilation ports. Dust
buildup is one problem, which you can take care of by cleaning the laptop's
vents and fan. A can of compressed air can be used to blow out some of the
dust. The more frequent issue that crops up is using the laptop on a pillow or
blanket, which can both obstruct the ventilation fan and retain the heat coming
off of the system. This can be avoided by only using your laptop on surfaces
like a table or desk, and a lapdesk will make a big difference when using a
laptop in bed.
7. Tune-Up
The next step is keep your laptop tuned up for more efficient use of power. A
few simple maintenance tasks and upgrades will not only help your battery last
longer, but they will also result in a faster system overall.
For starters, regularly defragment your hard drive to make
data retrieval more efficient. (Note: DO NOT try to defrag a solid-state drive,
as it will reduce the usable life the drive.) An active drive uses more energy
that an idle one, and defragging your hard drive reduces the amount of active
drive time needed to access data. Over time, as you add and remove files from
your system, data is haphazardly recorded to the hard drive, scattered in
different portions of the drive. This disorderly (or fragmented) data, requires
additional time and energy to access that information in the course of regular
use. Defragmenting your drive is the digital equivalent of organizing your
cupboards, making everything a bit tidier and easier to find. Windows 7 amd
Windows 8 both have automatic tools that defragment your drive on a regular
basis, but you should at least check to be sure that this is enabled and
running properly.
Decluttering your drive will also make it more efficient.
Practice good computer hygiene and regularly remove unwanted programs, clean
out cobwebbed files, and ditch any excess bloatware that came with your system.
Your cleanup should also include cleaning out the cache on your Web browser and
deleting all of the old files from your downloads folder.
8. Upgrade Components
Another option is to ditch the hard drive entirely, and upgrade to a
solid-state drive (SSD). Solid-state drives use flash memory instead of a
spinning disk, so there are no moving parts, automatically offering more energy
efficiency. It also removes the problems associated with fragmentation, which
is a larger problem with hard drives. Upgrading to an SSD will both improve
your battery life, and put some pep in your system, as SSDs offer faster
performance and boot times than their traditional counterparts.
Finally, add some more RAM to your system. RAM stores data
for short term use in flash modules, much like an SSD. The more data that can
be put into RAM, the less reliant the system will be on pulling that data
afresh from the hard drive. Again, reducing hard drive activity reduces the
power consumption, but like an SSD upgrade, adding RAM also has performance
benefits that you will notice immediately.
9. Battery Backup
Finally, the easiest way to ensure that you always have enough battery power is
to bring along an extra; either a spare battery or an external battery
pack. For laptops with a removable battery, the simplest option is a second
battery. These can either be ordered directly from the manufacturer, or
purchased from a third-party company, usually for less than $100. Simply swap
the old battery for the new once in a while when charging, and bring along the
charged-up spare whenever you expect to be away from a power outlet.
Another, similar option is to buy an external power pack.
While it is also technically a battery, these external power sources plug into
your laptop just like your charger does. They generally cost between $100 and
$200, but come with adapters for use with many different laptop models, and can
be reused on more than one system, and even for other devices, like your phone
or tablet.
0 comments: