Habitually Good

All of us laptop users have at one point or another wished that our battery last a little while longer when a power source is not readily available.

There are many things that you can do to ensure that you get the maximum out of your laptop’s battery. And all of these are easy things. Below are the 5 things that eat up your battery the most:

• CPU
• Graphics Card
• Hard Disk
• Display
• Wifi

If you can control these 5, you can really prolong the charge that your battery gives you. Here are some guidelines:

CPU - try not to use any CPU intensive applications while on Battery mode. Close extra applications that you are not using and might be consuming CPU cycles.

Graphics Card - simply put, don’t play games while on Battery mode.

Hard Disk - don’t carry out activities which require a lot of Hard Disk IO. For example, don’t decide to reorganize the file structure in your documents folder while on Battery. Or, don’t start defragmenting your disk; or don’t run a virus scan.

Display - reduce the brightness of your display to as low as you can tolerate.

Wifi - if you are not going to get hooked up to a Wireless LAN, then disable your wireless adapter while on battery.

Basically, don’t use your laptop for anything but essential work while on Battery and you will be able to keep it going much longer before requiring a charge up. You can use Windows Power Options to set for more battery life as compared to performance. This will help throttle CPU usage.

To view a detailed breakdown of how these parameters effect battery life, visit this post on Jeff Atwood’s blog, where he actually measures the power consumed by the various components of the laptop.

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