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Boost your battery life: Laptops & netbooks

Posted on 11 Mar 2009 at 16:54

Remember, too, that there are alternatives to watching movies from DVD if you're on a long-distance train or flight. You can now download TV programmes or films from BBC iPlayer, 4 on Demand, Sky Anywhere or iTunes, and there are relatively easy ways of bypassing copy protection if you want to rip your own, legally-owned films to your hard disk. In our benchmark tests, we managed an extra nine minutes of playback time when running video from HDD rather than DVD. That isn't a huge saving in its own right, but combined with other power-saving measures mentioned here, they start to add up.

Add more memory

The less RAM you have, the more data Windows puts through virtual memory on the hard disk, which consumes more juice than RAM alone. Another stick of RAM will add a negligible amount to your system's power consumption, but will save a lot of wear and tear on your hard disk - and give you a smoother Windows experience to boot.

Defrag your hard disk

A small tip from Dell: "Your hard drive is in constant motion while the computer is turned on; spinning to locate previously saved data. Defragmenting your hard drive (optimising the placement of data) will allow the drive to find information more quickly and (for some drives) reduce the speed it's rotating at."

In short, the more efficiently contiguous data is located on the platters of your hard disk, the more effectively the drive can stream it off, and the less time it spends hunting for the right cluster. When the drive doesn't work so hard, neither does your battery.

Think about your applications

All applications place demands on your CPU, GPU, RAM, motherboard chipset and hard drive, and the harder these components work the more energy they consume, and the more effort your laptop's cooling systems have to put in to keeping them ticking. According to Dell's Bob Bennett, "programs that cause intensive use of the processor and drives, such as playing a DVD movie or 3D games, can more than halve the amount of time that the computer can be used on battery power".

Therefore, save the video editing or Call of Duty sessions until you're back on the mains. While you're at it, try to cut down on multitasking. In modern computing it's practically impossible to avoid, but keeping several applications open at a time - even when idle - will drain your battery faster than starting one, using it, then closing it once finished. What's more, the more applications you use and documents you have open, the more virtual memory will be used and the more work your hard disk will receive. Again, battery life will suffer.

Make friends with MSConfig

Your laptop may already have services and applications running in the background, and these will all consume power. You shouldn't stop your virus checker or firewall from operating, but a little judicious pruning of applications and services in MSConfig will help extend battery life - and speed up your system and boot times.

You can find MSConfig in Vista by clicking Start | All Programs | Accessories | Run and typing MSConfig at the prompt. Click OK. Now, on the General Tab select Selective Startup and then go through the items listed on the Startup tab, ticking them in or out of use as you see fit. If unsure, Google the item to find out what it is, what it does and whether it's essential, or just another irritating helper applet for a program you barely use.

Take care of your battery