How To Improve Notebook Battery Life

Anyone with a notebook knows that at the end of the day, battery life is still the key mobility factor when using a notebook on the road. Some users might turn to extended batteries, while others already have one and are looking to squeeze out handful of minutes before they run out of juice somewhere. An area that many notebook users overlook is the software that is running in the background on many notebooks that acts as a leech, sucking away at your power and making your notebook work harder than it should. With a few minutes worth of simple changes, you can easily crank out some more time from your notebook following our guide.

Most of this guide will target notebook running Windows Vista, but many of the same tweaks hold true for Windows XP.

Keep your processor working at a walking pace

Most notebooks offer power regulation software, and almost all have the ability to change profiles using the Vista power manager. Click on that battery icon on the bottom of your screen, and make sure your notebook is set to Balanced or Power Saver. High Performance is great if you are encoding video or playing games, but it makes your processor work harder than it has to, using more power and throwing out more heat.

Tune your radio dial

Keep an eye on your wireless devices, and disable them if they are not in use. If you have your Bluetooth or WiFi device running at all times, you are using chopping off useful battery life that could have been used doing something else.

Change your viewing habits

The biggest power draw on your notebook, especially if it is a large one, is the screen backlight. While it may look big, beautiful, and shiny, you are really hurting your battery performance with the backlight at a high level. Start by putting the backlight to the lowest setting, and increase it slowly until you find the lowest setting your find bearable. Remember that this will vary depending on the room you are in, meaning you might have it set brighter in an office setting, but much lower at home at night.

Don't be tempted by movies

If at all possible, stay away from using DVD's or CD's in your laptop while using battery power. The drive creates a huge power draw on the system while running. On top of the drive, your processor is also working hard to decode the audio and video, sometimes knocking off close to 30% of your overall battery life. If you must watch movies, try to stick with digital content that you download or stream online. iTunes and Hulu.com are excellent alternatives to the evil discs.

Kill unwanted background activities

Right out of the box, almost all notebooks have the following processes running in the background, which eat up precious CPU cycles and trash your hard drive.

Automatic Updates: While keeping your system up to date is a good thing, this should be optional to have done at your own leisure. I prefer to update my system when I don't care about battery life, or have my system connected to AC power. To disable this activity, go into your control panel and click on ‘Windows Update". In the next window click on "change settings" on the left side, and make your way to the next screen. Now change your selection to "Never check for updates", and click OK. Please note that this may make your system vulnerable if you don't manually check for updates on a regular basis.

Windows Indexing: Windows disk indexing helps to reduce search times when trying to find a particular file on your hard drive, but will wreak havoc on your battery life in the process. To disable indexing, open "My Computer" and right click on your hard drive. On the first screen that shows up, uncheck "Index this drive for faster searching". You will need to proceed through a few prompts, as well as clicking "ignore all" if prompted. This may take quite a bit of time depending on how full your drive is.

Anti-Virus Software: AV software is a huge performance hog, but also a life saver depending on what type of sites your visit or what sorts of files you encounter. I am relatively savvy enough to steer clear of harmful items in my daily activities, and have yet to need any AV software for years. Not only can they be a huge resource hog and bog your machine down, they sap away a lot of battery life if they start scanning in the background. Be warned that removing AV software from your system can be risky, and should be done at your own discretion. If need more than one hand to count the number of virus problems you have had in the past, don't follow this suggestion.

The next step of this guide requires you to use the Task Scheduler, and disable a few services that your computer queues up at various times while you are using your computer. This can be accessed by going into your program list, then Accessories, then System Tools, finally clicking Task Scheduler.

In the list of Active Tasks, the following items cause the most unwanted activity in the background. To disable any of these items, double click the selection which will take you to another screen listing more details on that activity. Now all you need to do is right click the item, and click disable to stop it from bothering you in the future.

Consolidator: Runs in the background for the Customer Improvement Program.

Scheduled Defrag: Defragments your hard drive, and will bog down your system in the process. I handle this at my own leisure instead of letting the system schedule it weekly.

Clean up after yourself

Having additional programs working in the background when no longer in use can reduce system performance and decrease battery life. If you are done using a certain application, exit out of it properly instead of just minimizing it to the background. Also note that some programs drop down into your taskbar when you click the X at the top right of the screen. These can usually be killed by right clicking them in the taskbar, and clicking exit.

Conclusion

By following this guide and being mindful of the software you are using on your laptop, you can extend your battery life so you have that extra time when you really need it. Even when not increasing battery life, many of these tweaks help improve system performance, and many times make a speed demon out of a computer previously thought to be a slow relic. Think of yourself as the computer, and understand if you are working harder, you are expending more energy in the process. If you slow down and work at an easier pace, you will probably have more energy left when all is said and done.

 

I was hoping to see under-volting included in your guide but I guess it would be too intimidating for most users.

 

Thanks for this good advice.

One discussion about squeezing the maximum time out of the battery is the Intense Power Savings thread (to which I made some contributions so i won't repeat them here).

Playing DVDs will always drain some power but I noticed that on my Sony G11 running Vista with 2GB RAM then the optical drive would only run for about 1 minute in 20. I think that Vista was caching the DVD contents into the spare RAM so it avoided the power drain of the ODD running continuously. However, DVDs create significant GPU load.

It is worthwhile doing individual tests on battery performance while monitoring the power drain. Several software packages do this. I usually use the battery info page of RMClock. Battery capacity in Watt-hours divided by the power drain in watts will give the battery time in hours (that's how Windows calculates the time remaining, but it is useful to see the actual numbers including the true battery capacity).

Undervolting doesn't add much, if anything, if the CPU has been locked to the minimum speed (as recommended in this guide) for recent Intel CPUs since Intel locked the minimum voltage. It will provide a benefit if you use the performance on demand power profile. There's a useful undervolting guide here.

John

John

 

I was think u can probably add the following
-Install AMD Drivers if yr processor is a AMD Model for me i really help by throttling the CPU multiplier
-Disable unused Device under Device Manager in Control Panel
I am not sure about this but for me the battery remaining time really went up after i did this Now my Laptop can run for more than 2 hrs from barely 1hrs after i did the 2 above not forgeting the guides disable unwanted programs
Well Done

 

Essential tips all notebook users should know. Thanks Kevin.

 

May I also suggest that you don't need to shut off Windows Indexing, but you can set it to not run on battery in the power profile?

Also, I have read that disabling the page file can save battery life. Is it true?

 

Nice article Kevin. I especially find indexing to be a pain - the hard drive seems to thrash around a lot, so I disabled it.

I did some pretty thorough power consumption tests back when I wrote my M1330 review, so here are some hard numbers to back up your suggestions. To put this in context, productivity work (web browsing, word processing and emails) consumed approximately 15.6W per hour. This is with a M1330, T7100, 8400M GS, 5400RPM drive and an LED-backlit display. Percentages are compared to overall system consumption in the situation mentioned.

Delta between lowest brightness and highest - 2.6W (16.7% - productivity consumption)
DVD from optical drive (23.8W) versus from hard drive (21.4W) - difference: 2.4W (10.1% battery life increase)

A couple other suggestions:

By default, Windows Vista will automatically disable its transparency effects under Power Saver mode, so it may be beneficial to skip even Balanced mode and go straight for Power Saver. The sidebar also causes (at least in the case of discrete) video cards to ramp up, when you mouse over it for example. Other things to try would be to disable a built-in webcam if you don't use it.

I'd also suggest installing SP1 if you're running Vista. It improved battery life in the range of 9-10% under productivity workloads for me, which is quite significant. (15.6W before to 14.2W after)

 

For those with Windows XP, you can manually disable parts which will use battery power. For example, you can disable the Infrared port, USB ports, ExpressCard/PCMCIA slot, Optical Drive, etc.

I went from using 19v at 2/10 brightness, WiFi on and surfing to 14.5 with the same settings but disabled a handful of hardware.

 

I also find that having XP turn off your LCD after 1 min of idling makes a drastic difference for intermittent note taking. I was able to stretch my laptop through a 2 hour class when its battery usually dies in less than 1.5 hours.

 

The screen is the killer, obviously anything you can do there is going to save the most amount of battery life.

Although wireless is pointed to as a power drain, it's actually not too bad so long as you're not constantly searching and connecting to a network. Acquiring a network costs the most amount of power. It also depends how much data you're transmitting via wireless.

Disabling ports you don't use can help too.

 

Well you should also add the known fact, that proper battery calibration improves battery life!

Some people use the BIOS utility to calibrate.. unfortunatly my BIOS doesnt carry this utility.. can any one suggest a good software to calibrate the battery? anyone?

 

Hey I got a really good idea!! How about we just leave the computer completely off and tape a picture of something on the screen to make it look as though we are doing something and the battery will last forever! Yah!!

 

yay for common sense

 

Sorry for my ignorance, how can you tell how much voltage your computer is using while on battery? What application do I need?

 

I think he meant wattage, in which case try RMClock. The battery voltage will remain about the same, regardless of load.

 

I was also expecting to see under-volting. For me it makes a huge difference using RMClock for the Performance on Demand profile. Uses less power, creates less heat, which means the fan does not need to be on high powered all the time.

every little bit counts when you are trying to squeeze minutes.

 

Thanks for the tips. However, I really do not recommend anyone surf the net without proper AV installed..

I know what you're thinking. There were a lot of AV systems where it would drain all your resources and do constant scanning *cough Norton cough*, but there are a lot of newer ones out there now that only take a tiny fraction of your resource (eg: NOD32 which only took about 2 MB of ram to run in the background). Those things do NOT constantly run scans on your system (you can even turn off scheduled scans if you want to) and only periodically checks online for updates. It works with you in the background so when you launch a program it does a really quick scan (you won't notice it on the front end) and only displays a prompt if that file/program you re opening is infected.

I'm currently researching into fighting virus/spyware over a forum and it is highly advised not to go without some sort of protection software. I used to think I was very savy too, but ended up finding over 10 infections were on my computer. Some trojans can be quite devastating because it can steal credit card info and log what you type. It can be very serious and since people usually use laptops for work and business related purposes, I wouldn't recommend going without protection.

My 2 cents.

 

Hi everyone,

I've got a Sony VGN-340E and have been thinking about buying a Bluetooth mouse. Have you got any info on the impact of that device on battery life? Is it a glutton for battery power?

Cheers,

Leco

 

i do surf w/out any antivirus..
i rely much on my firewall since it always asks me whenever every programs are executed..so i can choose which program is safe for run or it is a virus...
yes! i know any file which is most likely virus....so i am a living antivirus for my computer..althou nobody/nothing make no mistakes
its nearly 8 years since the first virus attack i got,and the last virus i had on my computer,is half a year ago