How to increase your laptop’s battery life (Windows)

We’ve talked about how to save the battery life of your smartphone, but many people overlook the laptop battery. Of course, you have the option to keep your laptop plugged in at all times, but that defeats the portable concept of the laptop – you want to be able to move around freely, safe in the knowledge that you’re charged up. Here are just a few ways you can increase your Windows laptop’s battery life.

Power Saving

Select ‘Power Options’ in your Control Panel. You’ll be asked to select a power plan. Most people use the ‘Balanced’ plan, which creates a good balance between full performance and power saving while inactive. The ‘High performance’ plan uses a lot of energy and will use up your laptop battery much faster than other plans, so steer clear of this if you want to preserve battery. If you really want to save battery, choose the ‘Power saver’ option – this greatly reduces system performance and keeps the brightness of the screen low, using much less energy.

If you select ‘Change plan settings’ and click ‘Change advanced power settings’, you can manually tweak the performance of certain components, including the display, power buttons and USB settings.

Don’t sleep, hibernate

Putting your laptop into sleep mode means it keeps the current state of your system loaded in order for it to power on quickly when you want to continue using it. Letting your laptop hibernate means your system state is saved to disk and the device powers off, so it uses practically no energy.

Screen brightness

Simply put, the lower the brightness, the slower is drains battery. Set the brightness level to a comfortable level without being too high. You can alter the brightness

Quick tips:

– If you don’t plan on using the internet while using your laptop, it might be a good idea to turn your WiFi off, as it uses up energy

– Turn off your screensaver

– Avoid automatic start-up programmes (e.g. Spotify loading up as soon as the laptop is turned on

If you have an old laptop that frequently runs out of power, it could be an issue with the battery itself. Consider getting the battery replaced, or upgrade to a newer laptop.