How to: Improving laptop battery life

Your battery on your laptop is a precious commodity. After all without it, you would have to keep your laptop plugged in constantly, defeating the purpose of 'mobility. 

And all too often users find themselves at a local Starbucks with 8% battery and no available plug! 

Here are a few steps to increase your laptop battery life.

1. Adjust your battery performance. 

This is probably the quickest and easiest way to increase your battery time.

On Windows 10 PCs clicking the battery icon will display the battery performance slider.

* The Best Performance mode is for people willing to trade off battery runtime to gain performance and responsiveness. 

In this mode, Windows won't stop apps running in the background from consuming a lot of power.

* The Better Performance setting limits resources for background apps, but it otherwise prioritizes power over efficiency.

Better Battery mode delivers longer battery life than the default settings on previous versions of Windows. (It's actually labeled "Recommended" on many PCs.)

* Battery Saver mode, a slider choice that will appear only when your PC is unplugged, reduces the display brightness by 30 percent, prevents Windows update downloads, stops the Mail app from syncing, and suspends most background apps

2. Simplify your workload:

Time is money and multitasking is wonderful, but having several programs open at once can cause the processor to work harder. Closing out unnecessary apps and programs keeps the load off the processor, and saves on battery juice.

Overheating is the biggest cause of battery drainage. The next two steps insure fan operation is efficient in cooling your laptop. And also prevent laptop shutdown due to overheating.

3. Clear the way

The most simplest is insuring your laptops fans have clear opening for air flow. No air flow means no cool air getting to the components causing the fans to work harder and places a strain on your laptop battery. Usually intake fans are on the bottom of laptops and exhaust ports on the sides. Insuring these ports are free and open for air flow will increase your battery lifetime overall.

4. Clean out your processor fan:

Overtime cooling fans gather dust. The more dust & dirt the fan accumulates, the less efficient the fan is,and it has to work harder to cool the internal components.

A fan that runs continuously full power trying to cool your laptop will kill your battery in a matter of minutes.

A simple temporary fix is to use a small hand-held vacuum to suck out the dirt from the port. (Do NOT use a household size vacuum as this may dislodge components or cables within the laptop)

For a more thorough job, this step is a little more advanced, however it's one of the most efficient to solve overheating issues.

A. First - remove the laptop battery.

B. Using a small screwdriver remove the back panel of your laptop (screw locations vary by laptop models)

C. Locate the CPU fan. Using a QTip or cotton swab, carefully clean the fan blades.

D. Using a can of compressed air, blow the excess dust from the area.

E. Replace panel and screws, replace battery and DONE!

5. Upgrade from a hard drive (HDD) to solid state (SSD). 

Hard drives contain mechanical moving parts. The spindle, the armature and the spinning platters (at 7200 rpms) actually create alot of heat. This requires the fans in your laptop to work harder thereby draining precious juice from your battery. Upgrading to an SSD can increase your battery life up to 15%. See my Advantages of SSD over HDD article for more info on this.

There you have it. Following these steps can save your laptops battery lifetime and keep your peace of mind knowing you have a little more juice left.