Ever wonder how you can improve your laptop battery life? Do you always charge it or you should always use it in battery mode? How often should you charge it and what’s the ideal time or frequency to switch off the laptop? Is sleep or hibernating laptop better than power off? This post is about answering all your queries about battery life. If you have any questions then dive right into the comment section and ask your questions, we will try to answer it! Let’s begin our post.

Reduce Brightness

This is pretty obvious to be honest. But again, it is one of the major source of power drainage. Try not to use a high brightness level when possible. Function keys or pressing windows and then brightness will give you this option.

Remove power consuming app if not in use

We all have so many unnecessary apps we have installed on our pc. They just consume space and memory. Many have auto start up behavior that harms battery life. Use Revo uninstaller if you are not able to uninstall apps. It is very helpful. If you need help deciding what is useful and what is not, read Marie Kondo’s book “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying up“. it sure won’t hurt and you will learn something in the way.

Look for the auto starting app and shut down their auto start behavior

As I mentioned previously, the auto start-up behavior is very bad for laptop battery. Unless it is very essential, just shut it down. Give it a low priority. It can be accessed by simultaneously pressing ctrl+shift+esc keys to access task manager. Under their look for startup and then disable the ones like Microsoft one drive and others which you think are not necessary. Sorry Microsoft.

Don’t play games which your laptop can’t handle

You might be getting bored with the heading. It is obvious but I need to iterate over this point so kept it here.

Turn off your hard drive when it is idle

This one can be life saver, I mean battery saver if you are planning not to use laptop for a while. Just follow the instruction here. They have explained it pretty nicely.

Use windows optimization setting

This is often ignored by most of us. There is an Indian phrase, “Diya tale andhera” which is relevant in this context. Windows have the option of optimizing battery performance to battery saver, high performance, balance and anything in between. Use it wisely. If using a high GPU or RAM utilizing software like Ansys, Adobe premier, high performance might not be a bad idea but in other cases balanced and saver option is the best.

Use applications built from the laptop manufacturer for health monitoring

My laptop is Acer Aspire 7 i5. Acer has provided Acer care Center app for this. It is very useful for battery. It helps maintain battery level. There is an option which prevents overcharging. It stops charging at 80%. As battery have that fixed duty cycles, this is a good idea. Similar app for other manufacturers are there, use it!

Check battery usage by app

Some apps are there that are notorious. Try to use Edge browser or chrome browser if and when possible. They are the best. Other browser consume a lot of power. Sometimes there are apps like Microsoft teams and other which always have their name on top on power hungry app. Stop them when not in use.

Sync less often

Well well well, this is as bad as it gets. Most of our laptop has that apps that constantly sync something as a backup. It is not advisable. I would suggest rather to use Mega or other cloud services like OneDrive, google drive to occasionally upload your documents and other settings. That is how sync is done in our world.

Use hibernate option more often

Have you heard of the word hibernate? Probably in your high school about bear sleeping throughout the winter. Well laptop has similar option. It is like sleep option but much better. Hibernate is basically power off without boot loading or restarting. Almost 0 power drainage if kept in hibernate for hours. Hibernate>> sleep so use it more often. You can access it through Alt+F4 key combination.

Try to keep battery level between 20-80%. Full charge is usually not necessary

This was what I found out through online forums and my acer care app. Try to follow this.

Black background and wallpaper/screensaver settings

This is a pretty good option if you are comfortable, ykwim.

Turn off bluetooth and wifi when not in use

A simple tip most of us won’t follow, bookmark this page to be reminded.

Generate battery report with command powercfg/batteryreport

Periodically checking battery report might help you diagnose what is causing the issue. Press windows +R button. Type cmd, it will open command prompt. Inside it, type powercfg/batteryreport. It will generate a html file and display the location it saved the file. Analyze it, become an engineer and get hired, just kidding.

Turn off keyboard blacklight

This is a no brainer, unless you want to impress someone, like really?

Don’t keep laptop plugged in always

This is self explanatory but most of us always keep laptop plugged in, don’t do that!!

These were some of the ways to improve battery life. Do comment if you have any other suggestions!