When you’re home, or in a coffee shop and have the laptop power adapter with you and if there is the available outlet you won’t worry about the battery life of your portable computer. But, when you are on the go and need to work or finish an important task, you’ll rely on the battery. In most cases, it will last for a few hours, and it’s important to know how you can increase laptop battery life. We are going to share a few tips with you.
See also: How to fix a slow computer
Tips to increase laptop battery life
Lower screen brightness
One of the basic things you can do that will help you to increase laptop battery life is to reduce the screen brightness. Find the Fn key on your laptop, press and hold it, and then press brightness buttons to decrease brightness level.
Turn of backlit keyboard
Many laptops come with the backlit keyboard, a super handy feature that allows you to see the keys when it’s dark. Yes, the light is nice but if you want to save battery life, you should turn it off.
Close the programs which are running in the background
If you see many programs in the system tray, it is the right time to close a few. When a bunch of programs running in the background it will affect the battery life. Disable the programs you don’t need at the moment. If you don’t use those programs at all, you may uninstall them from your computer completely by going to Control Panel > Uninstall a program.
Another thing you should pay attention to are startup programs. Many programs you installed will start when you boot your laptop, and that’s really unnecessary. There are some programs that should start right away, such as your antivirus software, but there are many others you should disable. If you need them, you’ll turn them on. Follow these steps:
- Open Start menu and in the search box, type the following: msconfig.exe
- Hit enter
- Select Startup tab
- You’ll see the startup programs there, and next to each program, you will find the box.
- Deselect the ones you don’t want to start up when you turn your laptop on.
This will not only increase laptop battery life, but it will also improve the overall performance of your portable computer.
Power plan
In Windows, you can select a power plan, and you can also change plan settings. Go to Control Panel, Power Options, and you will see two offered plans: Balanced, and Power saver. You can use the first one when you are at home, and power saver when your laptop is unplugged. Next to each plan, you will see Change plan settings, where you can adjust many things according to your needs.
Disable Bluetooth
Another thing you can do to save laptop battery life is to turn off the Bluetooth when you are not using it. To do this, open the Start menu and in the search box type: network connections. Then, click on View network connections. Find Bluetooth network connection – right-click and choose Disable.
There are some other things that may help you increase laptop battery life, such as turning off Wi-Fi, and unplugging USB devices. You should also avoid using demanding programs when your laptop isn’t running on AC power.
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Great article.