I'm buying my first laptop just last year and guest what? My laptop battery only can last long for only 3 hours! Yes, the specification is low but that's not mean I cannot find a way to make battery longer for my laptop.
We've all been there. You're in a meeting, or on the road, or in a classroom, and you find, to your horror, that your laptop
is nearly dead. Maybe you forgot your power adapter, maybe there isn't
an available outlet. For whatever reason, your battery power is
dwindling, and you still have stuff to get done. Hope is not lost,
however. There are some things you can do to buy more time on that
almost-dead battery so you can meet a deadline or respond to
an important email before it's too late.
Some of these techniques are for when you need to stretch your
battery at that very moment, while others are preventative measures,
best implemented before your battery life comes up short. Below are 5 short term strategy can be used:
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.
[Sources: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2458636,00.asp.]
So guys, no need to worry again once you facing this kind of problem. Have a try and let the life go on...
