How to make your laptop battery last longer

There are two main ways to make your laptop battery last longer. The first is to make sure you battery is ‘healthy’ so that it maintains the ability to store power, the second is to make sure that your laptop is working as efficiently as possible so that it uses the minimum amount of power.

In order to keep your laptop battery ‘healthy’ you need to use it! It’s as simple as that.

If you constantly use your laptop plugged into the mains, you battery is always on charge and this will reduce its ability to hold power. If you regularly ‘cycle’ (ie fully charge and then fully discharge) your battery it will power your laptop for considerably longer when you’re not plugged into the mains, as well as last longer i.e. not need replacing with a new battery!

The easiest way of achieving this in the real world is to run your laptop on the battery when you first come into the office in the morning. Let it run on batteries in the morning until it prompts to be plugged in, and then leave it plugged in for the rest of the day. This way it is getting a full cycle of discharge and charge everyday without it being an inconvenience to you and when you need it to run on battery it will last much longer, and you’ll know from experience how long it will actually last!

With the best regime your battery will probably need replacing after about 18months to two years. Impirius can supply nearly all laptop batteries at discounted prices and have them delivered to you next-business-day.

Ensure your laptop is using the least amount of power:
 
1. Adjust your screen brightness. Dimming your display can save a massive amount of battery power. On Dell laptops this can typically be done by holding down the ‘Fn’ Key and pressing the up or down cursor keys.

2. Turn off Wi-Fi if not in use- Most laptops have shortcut keys to instantly disable/enable wireless networking.

3. Turn off Bluetooth if not in use.

4. Disconnect external devices from your laptop (including your mouse if you can!) Don’t charge other devices like your Blackberry, mobile phone or iPod when your laptop is on battery. Disconnect all external devices like Modems and USB hard drives.

5. Defrag regularly. The faster your hard drive can do it’s work the less demand you are going to put on the hard drive and your battery. Make your hard drive as efficient as possible by defragging it regularly (but not while it’s on battery of course!) .

6. Cut down on programs running in the background, ie Skype, Itunes, Desktop Search, Blackberry manager software, Webcams, Messenger programs, BBC iPlayer, etc.

7. Add more RAM – Your laptop can run more of your programs in highly efficient RAM memory rather than constantly accessing your power hungry hard disk.

8. Run programs off your hard drive rather than your CD/DVD drive. Whilst your hard drive uses a lot of power the CD/DVD drive uses considerably more!

9. Set up and optimize your power options - Go to ‘Power Options’ in your windows control panel and set it up so that power usage is optimised (Select the ‘max battery’ for maximum effect).

10. Don’t multitask! Do one thing at a time when you’re on battery with as fewer programs open as possible. Do not run Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, whilst your listening to MP3’s and actually just working on the internet.

11. Buy a new and more efficient laptop! Laptops are getting more and more efficient all the time and manufactures are working towards all-day long batteries. It might be time to replace your ageing laptop or there could be a strong business argument for replacing your current laptop early to allow you (as well as your laptop) to work more efficiently! At Impirius we will listen to your laptop requirements and recommend the best solution for you based on our wide working knowledge of what’s available and how it actually performs in a business environment.