Problem

A customer using a laptop would like to extend the running time of their laptop when they do not have access to mains power.

Sources of battery drain?

The first step is to understand that when powered on every component consumes power from the battery.  The pie chart below gives you some idea of what the proportion each component consume of the available battery power.  With this understanding you can then target areas for saving power by adjusting settings to help extend battery life.

Display (brightness)

As noted in the above pie chart the display takes up a lot of the available power, in particular the display backlight causes significant drain on the battery, reducing the time the laptop will stay powered on. Therefore one way to help improve battery life when away from mains power is to reduce the brightness of the display as low as is comfortable.  Normally this can be controlled by a dedicated hotkey (usually one of the function keys) to turn it down.

Switching to Internal graphics
On some higher specification laptops there are two separate display chipsets.  If the laptop is being used to take notes rather than gaming switching to the lower power onboard graphics (away from higher specification discrete graphics) can positively extend the running time.

Changing power settings to conserve power drain from chipset

To deal with drain from the chipset of the laptop one can adjust power plan settings.

1. Press Start menu and search for “Control Panel” and click it in the list of results.
   
2. In “Control Panel” choose “Power options”.
   
3. In “Power options” observe which plan you are currently set on; usually “power saver or “Balanced”.
   
4. Choose “Power Saver” if available and then click “change plan settings”.
   
5. On the next screen you should see to options to change:
   
6. Set “Turn off display” to 15 minutes or less, this will turn off the display after a period of inactivity on the laptop.
   
7. Set “Put computer to sleep” and set this to 20 Minutes or less after for the time period of inactivity to wait before putting the laptop into sleep mode.
   
8. Click the link for “Change advanced power settings”.
   
9. In the next window observe the entry “turn off hard disk after (setting) minutes” and make it 20 minutes or less before which the hard disk will be turned off if the machine is left idle.
   
10. When you have finished click the “OK” button.
    
11. Then click the “Save changes” button in the previous main window.
    

Disable Bluetooth and Wifi when not using them

Consider temporarily dirabling Bluetooth and Wi-Fi antennas when not in use. If you do not need Wi-Fi for internet access (perhaps during a lecture) consider disableing Wi-Fi using one of the dedicated hotkeys on the laptop. The same can be said for Bluetooth if you are not using any Bluetooth devices.

Disconnect any unnecessary peripherals

If you have any devices attached to your computer, especially where they are bus powered such as an external hard drive of microphone try disconnecting them to save power.

Disabling background tasks

Each task a system has to do consumes a little power. If there are many background tasks running this will consume more power.

• Close any applications you do not need. You can also try disable any automated updates, scheduled tasks, and especially search indexing that may be taking place.
• Disable any Windows desktop gadgets and any applications in the System Tray.
• Press control+shift+escape to open Task Manager, then click Startup tab. This will show what startup tasks are running. Disable any you are sure you do not need by right clicking and choosing Disable. If you ned to re-enable use the same steps and right click to Enable them again.