Top 10 Ways to Extend Your Laptop's Battery Life

There’s nothing good about running out of juice when you’re trying to get stuff done, and being unable to find a plug to recharge your battery in the meantime. If you work on the go at all, here are some easy tips to extend the life of your laptop’s battery, both in a pinch and before you leave the house.

10. Tweak Your Built-In Power Saving Options

First, the easy fix: Get familiar with your laptop’s power management features. In Windows, it’s “Power Options,” which you can bring up by hitting Start and typing just that. In macOS, it’s in System Preferences under Energy Saver. Don’t overlook these, and don’t assume that the defaults are designed to save you juice. If you know you’ll be out and about with your laptop, tell your laptop to sip power as lightly as possible before you leave, so you don’t have to scale back what you’re doing after you’re already out.

9. Use Your Laptop Manufacturer’s Battery Maintenance Tools

Depending on the manufacturer of your laptop, they may include or offer battery maintenance tools that can tell you a lot about the health of your battery, along with their recommendations to extend its maximum life. For example, Sony and Lenovo both have tweaked battery maintenance panels, or their own utilities, depending on the version of Windows you’re using.

8. Grab a Battery Monitor for Deeper Insights on Charges, Cycles, and Remaining Life

If your manufacturer doesn’t have a specific battery maintenance tool—or you wiped it away in your last clean install or PC de-crapifying, all isn’t lost. There are a number of free utilities that can tell you everything you want to know about your laptop’s battery, no matter who made it (that includes you, MacBook owners.)

7. Keep the Brightness Down When You’re On the Go

If you’re out and about already, looking at a battery that may not make it to the next outlet you’ll have access to, the first thing you can do is to cut power to your laptop’s biggest power sink: the screen. Obviously when your laptop isn’t in use, it’ll be sleeping, but when it is in use, you can save some juice by keeping the screen brightness as low possible (while still being usable, of course.) If you have a Windows machine, you may even consider disabling adaptive brightness and controlling it yourself.

6. Keep It Cool

Heat is a battery killer, and it doesn’t just kill its short term life, it’ll shorten your battery’s long-term health as well.We’ve mentioned this before on several occasions, but it helps to keep your laptop as cool as possible, or at least avoid restricting airflow when you’re using it on the go. Grab a lap desk, keep the back elevated a bit if the fans are on the bottom, and avoid crowding the sides or back.

5. Avoid Full Discharges

We’re not going to wade into or settle the debate over whether it’s healthy or unhealthy for a battery to allow it to discharge completely and then charge it back up again—that’s for another day. However, one thing is for certain—most batteries do have a finite number of charge cycles, after which their efficiency is sorely depleted.

4. Kill Power-Hungry Apps and Processes

Along with minimizing the brightness of your laptop’s display, another tweak that’ll save you energy both before you’re low and when you are low is to kill any power-hungry apps or tools that run in the background while you work. It’s another old tip, back from the days when you could have tons of background processes sucking down power—more than today, really—but it’s still worth keeping an eye on.

3. Kill Power-Hungry Hardware, Too

As well as power-hungry applications, if you’re trying to squeeze as much possible battery life from your gear while you’re on the go, it helps to turn off any unnecessary hardware or features as well. Now would be a good time to disable Wi-Fi unless you need it, or Bluetooth for that matter. Don’t go crazy disabling every little hardware feature you have just to score a little more time, but if you’re out and about and don’t need some of those power-hungry features, certainly turn them off.

2. Use Hibernate, not Just Sleep, Whenever Possible

You may be tempted to just shut your laptop’s screen every time it’s not in use to save as much battery as you can, and that’s a good idea if you’ll open it again later, but if you can, use hibernate instead. The difference is simple—in hibernate, your laptop isn’t using power at all, while during sleep it’s still sipping power, just much much less.

1. Kill Those Tabs, or Try a Different Browser

This one might be a non-starter for many people, but your web browser is likely the most power-hungry app or tool you use, and more than a few browser developers know it. First, if you’re the type with a billion tabs open all the time, get familiar with how to manage them easily, or try an add-on like The Great Suspender, which can unload them from memory when not in use—which also saves your battery.

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