Tips to increase laptop battery run time

Is your laptop battery run time nowhere near the manufacturers estimates? To increase the laptop battery run time you need to reduce the rate at which energy is being consumed by the laptop. Fortunately there are many ways you can do this to improve your laptop battery run time.

If you're only interested in doing a few things to improve your laptop battery run time, these are the most important things you can do, and fortunately they're also the easiest and least disruptive:
  • Set the Windows Power Management settings to maximum savings
  • Set the brightness of the screen to the lowest level
  • Minimize game play and DVD viewing - these really sap the laptop battery run time
  • Use the Suspend or Hibernate feature when taking a break to preserve the laptop battery


    • The following things will help but won't result in such a big improvement to your laptop battery run time:
  • Disconnect any devices (such as modems, wireless LAN cards) that you are not using. Using a LAN cable rather than a wireless network card will increase laptop battery run time
  • Disconnect any USB devices that you are not using
  • Disable the Auto Insert Notification on the CD-ROM/DVD-ROM
  • Turn off the Autosave features in MS Office and other software
  • Disable the automatic formatters, spell checkers, and auto recalculate features
  • Add RAM to lower disk access time
  • Minimize the number of programs running at the same time
  • Check the power save settings under the BIOS. If this is not enabled then the Windows Power Management settings may not be functioning.
  • Use smaller programs when possible, such as WordPad instead of Word

    • Your laptop battery run time will slowly decrease as the battery ages and eventually it will not meet your needs and a replacement laptop battery will be necessary.