Did you ever have your laptop battery run down at a crucial moment in a presentation? This must be a common problem because it happened to us several times. On the last occasion our client shared their ideas for extending laptop battery life. We picked up a few tips, although the results are not dramatic.
First Thoughts For Extending Laptop Battery Life
It makes sense to turn off a laptop when not in use, and rest the battery. A new machine takes no time at all to restart, but an old one can take a minute (or longer). Sleeping a laptop presents a compromise:
- Sleep function suspends most laptop activities, but retains its active memory so it can restart almost instantly.
- Power consumption in this mode can be as low as one to five watts, depending on peripherals and settings.
However, not all peripherals consume the same amount of battery energy. We move on to outlining more possibilities for extending laptop battery life in the next paragraph.
Which Peripherals Use the Most Battery Power?
A laptop computer screen is a good place to start when extending laptop battery life, because it consumes over 40% of the energy. However, we can reduce this impact by turning down the brightness. Around 50% should be adequate for most users and applications.
Chip sets are next on the list of of energy consumers. These are on the motherboard, from where they control the flow of data between memory, processor, and peripherals. Chip sets can use up to 20% of battery power according to Blog About Batteries.
Using wi-fi, data, and internet connections to the world beyond also uses battery power, as the chip sets shuttle information to and from the laptop processor. Only keep them on if you are actually using them. Depending on your connection, you could also save money too.
The laptop processor and graphics card use almost 10% and 7% of the rest of the battery power respectively. There is not much you can do about that, other than sleeping or turning off the laptop. Take what you can use from this information. Think twice about sleeping your laptop for long periods.
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