28. MobilityGuru's 10 Tips To Extend Battery Life

Want to get the most out of your notebook battery? Our top ten power-saving tips for notebooks from MobilityGuru can't turn a power hungry monster into an energy-efficient miracle, but they can help you make optimal use of the electrical energy stored in your battery in order to add some (important) minutes to its working life.

Adjust your display brightness for current lighting conditions (lower is better, energy-wise). If a power management tool is available to control CPU behavior, or that of other system components, it makes sense to use any predefined settings it offers. As a rule, tweaking such settings manual makes little if any difference. If a vendor offers no supplementary power management tool for your notebook, always use the Portable/Laptop power scheme in the Windows Power Options control panel utility. As a rule, this is completely adequate as the processor itself uses an intelligent power management scheme. Manual selection of an alternate power scheme to support specific applications helps only in exceptional cases. Disable wireless Bluetooth and WLAN modules when they're not in use. Position your notebook so that heat can escape from inside the case to the outside unhindered. Avoid using it in direct sunlight. Bad ventilation leads to internal heat build-up, making the fan run more, which consumes more power. Higher temperatures also cause batteries to age and lose capacity more quickly. Those who use their notebooks primarily (or exclusively) for typical office applications should configure the graphics driver to conserve as much energy as possible. Make sure you have enough RAM. Not enough RAM forces more disk activity, which in turn increases power consumption significantly. By contrast, refreshing the contents of dynamic RAM consumes relatively little energy. We recommend Intervideo's WinDVD for DVD player software, because it obviously includes intelligent power management capabilities. Our tests showed that it adds 18 minutes to battery lifetime compared to other options. Avoid running applications that consume lots of power when you're away from a wall socket (such as encoding MP3 or video files, 3D gaming or mobile TV). The heavy load they put on the CPU and GPU raises power demand to high levels, which in turn serve to drain your battery. These applications also have a negative impact on the total number of recharges your battery can take. Above all, insert only those external devices into your laptop that you actually use. Use Device Manager to disable those ports and interfaces that you use only seldom or never. Even in quasi-standby mode, devices draw at least some energy through their respective interfaces.

Conclusions

Our test scenarios demonstrate how much energy individual components and external devices can consume under worst-case or extreme conditions. They also show how much these individual elements can significantly reduce battery life.

However, at the end of the day, a notebook's battery life is largely dependant on what you do with your notebook. Every user interacts with his or her notebook and its components and peripherals differently. The results clearly show that users' computing habits have a profound impact on notebook energy consumption.