Five ways to boost your laptop battery life

If you use your laptop a lot and find yourself frequently running out of battery, this tutorial might help. The team here at Dave’s Computers in New Jersey spend a lot of time on laptops and have come up with a few tried and tested ways to boost your laptop battery life. If you want more time between charges, we can help.

Here are some simple configuration changes you can make to ger more out of your laptop battery.

Turn down the brightness

The screen is the single biggest power drain on your laptop so turning down the brightness can boost battery life significantly. Select the speech bubble icon on your Windows desktop to access Action Center settings and select the brightness setting. Experiment with the levels until you can find one you are comfortable with that isn’t set at maximum.

Turn off WiFi and Bluetooth

WiFi and Bluetooth are both big power drains so turning them both off when not using them can save a lot of power. From the same Action Center settings menu, select one or the other and turn them off. Do the same thing to turn them on when needed and try to remember to turn them off when you don’t.

Turn off background applications

If you run intensive programs on your laptop, turning them off when you’re finished or not having them automatically start with Windows can save power. Shut the programs down when finished to stop them utilizing RAM and storage. Stop them starting automatically with Windows to achieve the same.

1. Right click the Windows Taskbar and select Task Manager.
2. Select the Startup tab and click Status to order programs by whether they boot with Windows or not.
3. Right click a program and select Disable to stop it starting with Windows.

Do this for all programs except your security software and you could see some real benefits to battery life.

Tweak your Power Plan

Windows does a decent job of managing power use automatically but you can manually configure it too.

1. Open Control Panel, select Hardware and Sound and Power Options.
2. Select the active power plan and select Change power settings beside it.
3. Change individual settings within the plan to maximize power savings.

You can also set the automatic plan for maximum power savings if you prefer to leave Windows to manage it.

Use Battery Saving Mode

Battery Saving Mode was introduced in Windows 10 and is a useful tool if you’re running low on power. Select the battery icon in the bottom left of the task bar and select Battery Saver. Windows will automatically configure your laptop to save as much power as possible.

Those are five simple ways to boost your laptop battery life. We hope they help!

If you think your battery may be on its way out, we here at Dave's Computers in New Jersey can replace it for you!