Saving power on the go – getting your laptop battery to last all day

The beauty of saving power, is that you’re also saving money. And in the case of laptops, that applies to home use as well as use on campus. So there’s an incentive for staff to want to manage their power use more effectively. So maybe this article will be of use for your internal IT newsletters too?

The Windows team, over at windows.microsoft.com, have released a new video on “saving power on the go”, which is all about using the power settings on your laptop to stretch out your battery life, and reduce the power use. The video is a very simple walkthrough of what you can do (designed for normal people, not geeks!) and then there are also a series of short articles on:

• Conserving battery power

• Change what happens when you close your laptop

• Power plans: frequently asked questions

• Sleep and hibernation: frequently asked questions

A short list of hints on conserving battery power are:

• Reduce display brightness
  
  
• Shorten the length of time before Windows dims and turns off the display
  • The Windows Engineering blog has a longer, more geeky, post on Windows 7 energy efficiency too, which goes into a lot of detail. There’s a nice chart (right) which shows where power goes in a modern laptop. The bit that I learnt is that the biggest drain on power in a laptop is the screen – so by dimming your screen when you can, you add a big chunk to the battery life.
    
• Turn off or remove devices that you aren't using
  • Many USB devices use power just by being connected.
  • If you use a USB mouse, you can save power by disconnecting the mouse and by using a touch pad or tablet pen.
  • If you use a USB flash drive, unplug it when you're not using it.
    
    
• Turn off PC cards and integrated wireless devices
  • These devices also use power. If you don't need them, turn them off.

Quickly find all the other Money Saving Tips on this blog