Reducing laptop power usage for improved battery performance
Getting the most from your laptops battery can be an essential but troublesome task, many users need their battery to last as long as possible between charges, below we will attempt to list some of the simple things you can do to help improve your laptops battery life between charges by reducing your power usage.
When you are far from a power socket and using your laptop, the last thing you want is to run out of juice, but what can you do? Below are some measures which would help you conserve the battery and at the same time improve its performance.
Lower down the screen brightness
Lowering the brightness of the screen adds greatly to decreasing battery consumption. As studies show, almost 10 to 12 percent of a laptop’s battery goes to the backlighting processes.
Taking the above into account, you could potentially increase your laptops battery life by around 5%, a useful boost I am sure you will agree.
Turn off connections
This means connections such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (assuming their not needed of course). Although they do not consume a great deal of battery power, turing them off will produce a small saving.
We reckon turning of these connections would increase your battery life by up to 2%.
Reduce performance of your CPU
This is an option for only some laptop users depending on their system, not all laptops have the option to reduce CPU performance, but if yours offers it you should use. It wont make a lot of difference to your laptops performance, but may increase your laptops battery life by up to 3%.
Get more memory (RAM)
May seem like a strange thing to do to help boost your laptops battery life but it makes sense with a little explanation.
PCs (laptops included) make use of 2 types of memory, firstly RAM (Random Access Memory) - this is the physical memory in the computer, usually a figure between 256mb and 4GB (a GB is 1000 mb), the second type of memory is 'virtual' memory, this is where your computer uses space on your hard disk to store some temporary data that it would normally store in RAM - if there was enough of it.
Because hard disk use uses more power than RAM use, increasing your RAM, and there for decreasing your 'virtual' memory use will help increase your laptops battery life. By adding more RAM you might well increase your battery life by as much as 5%.
Defrag your hard disk
As mentioned above, your hard disk uses a fair amount of power to operate, reducing hard disk use therefore helps your battery life.
What is defragging? Well, imagine your hard disk is an on old vinyl record sitting on a record player. Your computer will place information all across your hard disk (or record), which means to reach various pieces of data the head (or needle) needs to move back and forth across the entire width of the record to retrieve the data, this takes time (and therefore power).
What defragging does is to pull together all the data on the hard disk into the first area of the drive (or pull it all to the outside of your record). This means the head (or needle) no longer has to travel the entire distance across the record, it only has to go a little way as all the data is close the the outer edge.
Make sense? Well, if not it doesn't really matter, just make sure your hard disk is regularly defragmented and you could boost your battery's life by around 2%.
Conclusion
Reducing the laptop’s power usage would improve your battery life. Although sometimes, this means that you should trim down also the enjoyment. Nevertheless, this is very useful when you work on a place far from power sockets. You could reduce the power consumption and could work for a longer time. This is very handy if you are on a long trip.
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