GET THE BEST FROM YOUR BAT TERY
Tired of losing power at the worst possible moment? Here are a selection of tips for squeezing as much battery life as possible from your laptop
If you’re feeling frustrated that your laptop won’t quite last a full working day on battery power, just remember how far we’ve come. In the early days of laptops, you could expect to get only two or three hours away from the mains, and even that would drop off over time.
Then again, those 20th century battery packs did have the benefit of being removable, so you could extend your working time by snapping in a spare to replace an exhausted battery. And if a battery’s capacity degraded too much to be useful, you could simply buy a new one.
Nowadays, modern laptops almost always integrate the battery deep into a sealed design. That’s not a disaster, as the latest lithium cells have a much longer lifespan than the nickel-based technology that preceded them, and this approach helps manufacturers make their systems smaller and lighter. However, it also means that your battery can’t be easily replaced – so it’s all the more important to take proper care of it.
Charging and battery care
All rechargeable batteries gradually lose their capacity over time, and that includes the lithium battery in your laptop. You can see how it’s holding up by opening a command prompt as administrator and typing powercfg / batteryreport. This will generate an HTML document detailing all sorts of statistics about the state of your battery. In particular, under the “Installed batteries” heading you’ll see figures for “Design capacity” and “Full charge capacity”: the gap between these two ratings indicates how much charge your battery has lost since it was brand new.
While you can’t stop this gradual degradation, you can slow it down. The simplest way is not to tax the battery any more than you have to: the process of discharging and recharging wears down the internal cells, so if you’re in the habit of using your laptop on battery power every day, even when you’re sitting right next to a power socket, you could be dramatically shortening its life.
Even when you’re out and about, it’s best to avoid letting the battery dip below around 40% if you can. You may have heard that you should always completely run down a battery before recharging it, but that’s only true of old nickel-cadmium and nickel-metal hydride cells – today’s lithium batteries maintain their health better when they’re more than half-charged. Don’t worry about overcharging, either: your laptop will automatically cut off the power to the battery once it’s full. This means you can safely keep your laptop topped up, and should do so whenever possible.
None like it hot
Another hazard to look out for is heat. Batteries store and release electrical energy through controlled chemical reactions, and – as you’ll remember from O-Level Chemistry – heat makes reactions faster and more violent. Working in the blazing sunshine will cause your battery to run down more quickly than in a cool environment, and even when the laptop’s switched off, exposure to heat will shorten its life. Letting a battery get too hot for too long can even lead to internal damage – and since these batteries aren’t designed to be user-replaceable, the consequence is likely to be a costly and timeconsuming repair. To avoid that, try to keep your laptop cool whether you’re using it or not.
Work more efficiently
Laptop screens can consume a lot of power; we all know that we can significantly extend battery life by turning down the brightness. In older versions of Windows you could even set the OS to automatically dim the screen when you changed power source, but sadly this isn’t supported on Windows 10 systems, so you may have to manage your brightness manually.
You can also reduce your battery consumption by minimising the number of apps and browser tabs running in the background. It’s worth taking a look under the Startup tab of the Task Manager to see if there’s anything you can disable too. And remember to unplug peripherals such as external hard disks as soon as you’ve finished with them, as they’ll otherwise continue to suck up power for as long as they’re connected.
Finally, a significant consumer of power that’s easy to overlook is the wireless radio. If you want to eke out as much battery life as possible, you can consider switching your laptop to Flight mode – although in this connected age you might not be able to get much work done without a network connection.
“Remember to unplug peripherals as soon as you’ve finished with them, as they’ll continue to suck up power”