How to Preserve Laptop Battery Life

Getting the most life span out of a laptop battery is not that difficult but you will need to make some changes to your laptop settings. Not all laptop settings will be the same depending on what brand and which Operating System version you have.

Step 1

If you are a pc user that is always using your battery and on the go then you may want to purchase a higher performance battery with 9 cells. You can buy after market batteries but you may spend a lot of time looking around trying to match up a battery that fits your laptop. The best way to buy is to look up the manufacture of your laptop and input the laptop model into the website and then select a higher cell battery. You can also buy an extended battery from them as well. So if you have a Dell laptop then you would want to go to www.Dell.com and type in battery replacement along with your model as in Inspiron 1525 and it will display the different batteries that you can buy. You can use this technique for all laptop brands on the websites.

Step 2

If you don't want to buy a better battery than you can make some changes to your settings on your laptop that will increase the battery life.

Step 3

This is for Vista users
Click on start/control panel/Mobile Pc/Power Options.
Here you can select how much power you want to save but the more power you save the slower your pc becomes. (Note)that if you change the settings to power save or balanced then when your laptop is plugged into a power outlet, your laptop will still be set to a slower performance.

Step 4

Click on High Performance and click on Change Plan Settings. This is the best setting because you can fully customize how much power you can save while running of your laptop but when you plug into a power outlet your laptop will return to the High Performance Setting.

Step 5

When the High Performance Setting window pops up then click on Change Advance Power Setting and then the Power Option window will popup.

Step 6

Power Option Settings:

Here you have full control over your battery settings.
Click and expand the Hard Disk tab.
Turn off hard disk after: On battery: You can set this to the desire time that you want. I have mine set to 30min//Plugged in: Again, you can set this to the desire time that you want. I have mine set to Never because plugged in I am not using my battery.

Step 7

Expand the wireless Adapter Settings:

Power Saving Mode:
On batter: Here you can select Maximum Performance or Maximum Power Saving. If you want your internet to still be fast then select Maximum Performance but if you want to save on battery power and don't mind a slower internet then select Maximum Power Saving. There are two more settings that you can select to have it a Medium Power Saving and Performance.
Plugged in: You will want this to stay on Maximum Performance.

Step 8

Expand the Sleep tab:
Sleep After:
On battery: Select the time which you want it to go into sleep mode while running on the battery. I have mine set to 15min
Plugged in: I have mine set to Never

Step 9

Expand the Processor Power Management tab:
Minimum processor state.
This is how fast your laptop will be when plugged in or running on the battery
On battery: Set it to 15%
Plugged in: set it to 100%

Now expand the Maximum processor state:

On battery: you can choose 20% to save on battery but if you need more speed when running the battery you will need to increase this number to around 50%
Plugged in: Set this to 100%

Step 10

Expand the Search and Indexing tab:
Power Saving Mode:
On battery: Set it to Power Saver
Plugged in: Set it to High Performance

Step 11

Expand the Display tab:
Turn off display after:
On batter: set it to 5min
Plugged in: you can set it to whatever you want. I have mine set to 20min

These setting will turn off your screen after the given time that you set.

Step 12

When you are done click on Apply at the bottom and then on OK

Step 13

You will be back to the Change Settings for the plan: High Performance window. On this page you can adjust the display brightness:
On battery: slide the bar to the left and it will dim the screen when it is running on the battery.
Plugged in: You can just leave the slide bar all the way to the right.

If you do not change the display brightness then your graphic card software will be monitoring it and you will need to launch the program to make the changes.

Step 14

When you are done click on Save Changes at the bottom and close out all open windows.

Step 15

Un-plug your power adapter and move your mouse toward the time in the right lower side of your screen at the taskbar and place your mouse cursor over the power option icon and it will display the life of the battery. Ignore the warning about your current plan may reduce battery life because you made the advance changes to your battery. With these new changes on my laptop with a 6 cell battery I am now getting 4 1/2 hours of battery life. Before I was only getting 2 hours of battery life. But this is only with my laptop yours may be different.

Step 16

Also, the more programs that you run while using the battery will drain it faster so try not to run a lot of programs.

Step 17

Xp users

Click start/control panel and navigate to your power options.
Now I don't have windows xp anymore but if you look around on all the tabs and look for advance options then you will be able to adjust the battery life to what you want it to.

Step 18

If you are not happy with the performance of your laptop with saving more battery life then go back and increase the processor number.

Comments (1)

djeff37 said:

	... These are some very interesting tips to keep in mind when working under windows...
	report abuse vote down vote up

December 05, 2009
Votes: +0