Battery Knowledge Base

Longer battery life: Every laptop user wants it, but few know how to get it without buying a new machine. Though laptop manufacturers have made great strides over the past few years in increasing the efficiency (and thus the battery life) of their products, even the most efficient modern machines don’t last long enough for many users. What you may not realize, however, is that your system is probably loaded with integrated peripherals and bloatware that you’ll never use but that consume resources and reduce battery life.

In this guide, we’ll look at ways to reclaim those resources and maximize your laptop’s battery life. Some of the steps may require venturing into the BIOS or UEFI of your notebook, while others are simpler software tweaks.

Know What Kills Your Laptop Battery Power

Before diving in, review why notebook batteries die in the first place. From the CPU to the trackpad, every component in a laptop consumes power. The amount consumed varies from component to component and also fluctuates in response to environmental conditions such as temperature and system workload. The greater the number of components or peripherals attached to your laptop and the more work you do with it, the quicker the battery will drain. Every program, driver, or service that loads, every background task that runs, and every electronic circuit that fires up saps a tiny bit of battery life. Consequently, reducing the number of attached or active peripherals and minimizing the load placed on the notebook will prolong Acer aspire 4710 battery life.

Unfortunately, some of the burdens that the manufacturer or vendor places by default on your laptop’s battery may not be easy to track down and eliminate. As a result, you have to make an effort to minimize resource consumption and maximize battery life.

Try These Quick Fixes

aussiebattery has posted simpler articles about how to extend your laptop battery life, and we won’t cover the same items here. Keeping your laptop cool, dimming its display, and enabling system hibernation are all good ways to prolong battery life; but in this guide we’ll be focusing on hard numbers that illustrate the potential benefits of certain modifications.  Tweak Your Hardware and Software.

You can make a number of hardware and software changes to prolong your laptop’s battery life. However, some of these tricks might cause your laptop to function poorly or even to cease functioning entirely, so please be careful. Though we tested all of these tweaks on our own laptop, we can’t guarantee that they’ll work with your unique hardware; recognizing this, PCWorld cannot be held liable for any deleterious changes that might occur as a result of following this guide. When in doubt, make a backup.

On the hardware side, disabling or disconnecting unused components and peripherals will go a long way toward improving HP presario cq70 battery life. On the software side, disabling or uninstalling unnecessary (but resource-hungry) services and applications will help minimize power consumption. In addition, updating drivers–video drivers in particular–sometimes helps by enabling the system to optimize or offload certain processes, such as video encoding/decoding, from the CPU to relatively power-efficient dedicated hardware in the graphics processor.

Since every program or service that loads in Windows consumes system resources, you should disable the ones you don’t need or want. Start by launching the Windows System Configuration utility MSCONFIG: Click the Start button, type MSCONFIG in the Search field, and press Enter. In the resulting window, click the Startup tab to see all of the programs that start with Windows. You’ll probably see a number of programs that you won’t mind disabling. Our project notebook (an Acer Aspire Battery) listed eight items as automatically starting with Windows: antivirus software, Steam, QuickTime, three Adobe Acrobat-related items, Skype, and Trillian.

Having your most frequently used applications start with Windows can be handy; but if they’re not vital, it’s best to disable automatic startup and just start them manually when you need them. On our project system, we disabled everything but the AV software. To disable items in MSCONFIG, simply untick the box next to each program, apply the changes, and restart the system.