Problem

You are having problems with battery uptime. The suggestions below will help to trim your system's power consumption and lengthen battery uptime.

What is draining the battery?

Below is a chart to give an idea of typical battery drain profile. You can then target any modifications by how much impact different items have on the overall drain.

Display brightness

Your laptop display uses a fluorescent backlight behind the LCD display. This is one of the biggest power consumption items. Dimming the display brightness can be a very useful way of conserving battery life. Normally this can be controlled by a dedicated hotkey (usually one of the function keys) to turn it down.

Switching to Internal graphics
If the laptop has a secondary high performance graphic adaptor one of these video adaptors will be better suited to loweer power consumption. Consult the laptop documentation for information about which is best to use for better battery life.

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.

Windows 10:
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:
Set “Turn off display” to 15 minutes or less, this will turn off the display after a period of inactivity on the laptop.
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. 6 Click the link for “Change advanced power settings”.
7 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.
8 When you have finished click the “OK” button.
9 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.