HOWTO |Optimise your mac laptop battery life

1 Lower the screen brightness

Powering and lighting the display is a big drain and, even when the CPU is fairly idle, the screen still uses battery. Use the shortcut keys or go to System Preferences > Displays and lower the brightness a little. Newer Macs have an ‘auto brightness’ option you may wish to turn on.

2 Minimise wireless connections

If you’re not on a Wi-Fi network, turn Wi-Fi off from the menu bar icon at the top of the screen. If you are on Wi-Fi and have connected to remote drives, disconnect when you’re done, otherwise your Mac uses power to poll the network to check they are there. Do the same with Bluetooth devices.

3 Disable Power Nap

With the Power Nap system, newer Macs can perform certain functions when asleep. It should be deactivated while on battery power, but check at System Preferences > Energy Saver then select the Battery setting. Deselect ‘Enable Power Nap While on Battery Power’ to ensure it won’t use power.

4 Remove any optical discs

Most newer Apple laptops don’t have optical drives, but many older ones do. Having a disc in the drive when you’re not using it causes the computer to periodically whip up the drive, especially when you use search in the Finder. The motion of spinning the disc uses battery, so eject it.

5 Clean out your login items

Installing printers, scanners and other devices can cause small helper apps to be placed on your system. Go to System Preferences > Users and Groups and look at the Login Items. Use - to remove any you don’t need, to speed up login and reduce power consumption. See MF272 for more.

6 Minimise number of active apps

OS X 10.9 Mavericks has ‘App Nap’, to suspend apps not in the foreground. For earlier versions, and as a general rule of thumb, it helps to quit any app you’re not actually using to free up resources. If a program isn’t writing to your hard disk or RAM, you save a bit of energy.

7 Disconnect peripherals

Both USB and Thunderbolt connections are able to carry power, and they’re often used to power external devices, such as portable hard drives. If you’re working away from a power source, this power comes from your laptop battery, so if you’re not using a device, disconnect it.

8 Use ClickToPlugin

Safari Power Saver in OS X 10.9 disables parts of websites, such as Flash content, to use fewer resources when browsing. Simulate this on earlier OS X versions by installing the Safari extension ClickToFlash to block Flash content from playing. You can play only the ones you want to see.