10 Quick Ways to Speed Up a Slow PC Running Windows 7, 8, or 10

Windows PCs don’t have to slow down over time. Whether your PC has gradually become slower or it suddenly ground to a halt a few minutes ago, there could be quite a few reasons for that slowness.

As with all PC issues, don’t be afraid to give your computer a reboot if something’s not working properly. This can fix quite a few problems and is faster than attempting to manually troubleshoot and fix the problem yourself.

Find Resource-Hungry Programs

Your PC is running slow because something is using up those resources. If it’s suddenly running slower, a runaway process might be using 99% of your CPU resources, for example. Or, an application might be experiencing a memory leak and using a large amount of memory, causing your PC to swap to disk. Alternately, an application might be using the disk a lot, causing other applications to slow down when they need to load data from or save it to the disk.

To find out, open the Task Manager. You can right-click your taskbar and select the “Task Manager” option or press Ctrl+Shift+Escape to open it. On Windows 8, 8.1, and 10, the new Task Manager provides an upgraded interface that color-codes applications using a lot of resources. Click the “CPU,” “Memory,” and “Disk” headers to sort the list by the applications using the most resources. If any application is using too much resources, you might want to close it normally — if you can’t, select it here and click “End Task” to force it to close.

Close System Tray Programs

Many applications tend to run in the system tray, or notification area. These applications often launch at startup and stay running in the background but remain hidden behind the up arrow icon at the bottom-right corner of your screen. Click the up arrow icon near the system tray, right-click any applications you don’t need running in the background, and close them to free up resources.

Disable Startup Programs

Better yet, prevent those applications from launching at startup to save memory and CPU cycles, as well as speed up the login process.

On Windows 8, 8.1, and 10, there’s now a startup manager in the Task Manager you can use to manage your startup programs. Right-click the taskbar and select “Task Manager” or press Ctrl+Shift+Escape to launch it. Click over to the Startup tab and disable startup applications you don’t need. Windows will helpfully tell you which applications slow down your startup process the most.

Reduce Animations

Windows uses quite a few animations, and those animations can make your PC seem a bit slower. For example, Windows can minimize and maximize windows instantly if you disable the associated animations.

To disable animations, press Windows Key + X or right-click the Start button and select “System.” Click “Advanced System Settings” on the left and click the “Settings” button under Performance. Choose “Adjust for best performance” under Visual Effects to disable all the animations, or select “Custom” and disable the individual animations you don’t want to see. For example, uncheck “Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing” to disable the minimize and maximize animations.

Lighten Your Web Browser

There’s a good chance you use your web browser a lot, so your web browser may just be a bit slow. It’s a good idea to use as few browser extensions, or add-ons, as possible — those slow down your web browser and cause it to use more memory.

Go into your web browser’s Extensions or Add-ons manager and remove add-ons you don’t need. You should also consider enabling click-to-play plug-ins. Preventing Flash and other content from loading will prevent unimportant Flash content from using CPU time.

Scan for Malware and Adware

There’s also a chance your computer is slow because malicious software is slowing it down and running in the background. This may not be flat-out malware — it may be software that interferes with your web browsing to track it and add additional advertisements, for example.

To be extra safe, scan your computer with an antivirus program. You should also scan it with Malwarebytes, which catches a lot of “potentially unwanted programs” (PUPs) that most antivirus programs tend to ignore. These programs try to sneak onto your computer when you install other software, and you almost certainly don’t want them.

Free Up Disk Space

If your hard drive is almost completely full, your computer may run noticeably slower. You want to leave your computer some room to work on your hard drive. Follow our guide to freeing up space on your Windows PC to free up room. You don’t need any third-party software — just running the Disk Cleanup tool included in Windows can help quite a bit.

Defragment Your Hard Disk

Defragmenting your hard disk actually shouldn’t be necessary on modern versions of Windows. It’ll automatically defragment mechanical hard drives in the background. Solid-state drives don’t really need traditional defragmentation, although modern versions of Windows will “optimize” them — and that’s fine.

You shouldn’t worry about defragmentation most of the time. However, if you do have a mechanical hard drive and you’ve just put a lot of files on the drive — for example, copying a huge database or gigabytes of PC game files — those files might be defragmented because Windows hasn’t gotten around to defragmenting them yet. In this situation, you might want to open the disk defragmenter tool and perform a scan to see if you need to run a manual defrag program.

Uninstall Programs You Don’t Use

Open the Control Panel, find the list of installed programs, and uninstall programs you don’t use and don’t need from your PC. This can help speed your PC up, as those programs might include background processes, autostart entries, system services, context menu entries, and other things that can slow down your PC. It’ll also save room on your hard drive and improve system security — for example, you definitely shouldn’t have Java installed if you’re not using it.

Reset Your PC / Reinstall Windows

If the other tips here didn’t fix your problem, the one timeless solution to fix Windows problems — aside from rebooting your PC, of course — is getting a fresh Windows installation.

On modern versions of Windows — that is, Windows 8, 8.1, and 10 — it’s easier to get a fresh Windows installation than ever. You don’t have to get Windows installation media and reinstall Windows. Instead, you can simply use the “Reset your PC” feature built into Windows to get a new, fresh Windows system. This is similar to reinstalling Windows and will wipe your installed programs and system settings while keeping your files.

If your PC is still using a mechanical hard drive, upgrading to a solid-state drive — or just ensuring your next PC has an SSD — will offer you a dramatic performance improvement, too. In an age where most people won’t notice faster CPUs and graphics processors, solid-state storage will offer the single biggest boost in overall system performance for most people.

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How to Enable Emergency SOS Services on Your iPhone

In iOS 11, Apple has introduced a new Emergency SOS feature to the iPhone. Let’s look at what it does.

To use Emergency SOS on an iPhone 7 or earlier, press the power button five times quickly. To use it on an iPhone 8, 8 Plus, or X, press and hold both the power button and one of the volume buttons.

Emergency SOS does a couple of things. First, it locks your phone and disables Touch ID and Face ID. To unlock your phone again, you need to enter your password. We’ve talked about this feature before, and it’s a big deal, because under US law, the police can force you to unlock your phone with your fingerprint or face, but they can’t force you to enter your password. This, however, is just one aspect of Emergency SOS.

Emergency SOS also brings up a screen with three swipe bars: one to power off the iPhone, one to access your Medical ID, and one to call the local emergency services; in some areas such as China, you’ll be prompted to select which service you want, for example, whether you want to call the police or an ambulance. Swiping on any of them does exactly what you’d expect.

To configure Emergency SOS, go to Settings > Emergency SOS.

To have your iPhone start calling the emergency services as soon as you trigger Emergency SOS turn on Auto Call. This is on by default on the iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X.

Now, as soon as you trigger Emergency SOS, your iPhone will display a three second countdown and play a loud noise. Once the countdown ends, the iPhone will dial emergency services. You can cancel the call before the countdown ends by tapping Stop and then End Call.

You can also turn the countdown sound off in the Settings menu.

Emergency SOS pulls your Emergency Contact details from your Medical ID in the Health app. To add an Emergency Contact, either head to the Health app yourself or tap Edit Emergency Contacts in Health.

Emergency SOS is a handy feature with a few uses. It makes it easy for you to call the emergency services without knowing the exact number from anyone’s iPhone. It also stops people forcing you to unlock your phone with Touch ID or Face ID.


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What Can You Do With Samsung’s Bixby?

It seems like every technology company under the sun is working on a voice-controlled assistant to go up against the likes of Google’s Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, and Apple’s Siri. Samsung’s branded version gets a boost from the company’s massive smartphone market share and a somewhat less-than-graceful inclusion of an extra hardware button on its latest models. But what all can Bixby do, and how is it different from its erstwhile competitors?

It Can Be Started With a Button (or Your Voice)

Like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, Bixby can work with a voice command—in its case, the rather uninspired “Hi Bixby.” Unlike the others, though, the service also gets a dedicated hardware button on Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S8 and Note 8 phones, putting its functionality front and center. You can expect the feature to trickle down into Samsung’s less expensive models in the coming months, as well as ancillary gadgets like an Echo-style speaker and compatibility with third-party gadgets.

Bixby Integrates With Phone Apps and Hardware

Samsung’s voice control app is designed primarily to access the functions of the phone without having to touch it. In this area, it’s more or less the same as Assistant and Siri, with a couple of notable differences. Voice commands following “Hi Bixby” can activate Samsung apps and third-party apps, and even some of the functions within those apps. For example, “open clock and set alarm for eight AM” is something fairly basic that it can handle easily.

Samsung claims that Bixby’s Voice can perform 15,000 individual voice commands, and its list is growing all the time. It’s integrated will all of the basic apps on Samsung phones, like the dialer, weather, clock, email, and so on, along with more popular third-party apps like the Facebook Android app, Gmail, Instagram, and Twitter. In addition to baked-in commands like “what’s the weather,” Samsung has built a basic “learning” function into Bixby. This lets users train the service to recognize new and generic phrases, like “open Pandora and play my favorite station,” to activate specific functions tailored to their applications. Bixby has deep integration with Samsung’s own apps, too: for example, one of the actions it can perform out of the box is “open camera and turn on ‘Save RAW and JPEG files’ for the rear camera.” Complex stuff.

At the moment, Bixby Voice’s advantages over its competitors are debatable: it seems to be more tightly-integrated to phone hardware than Siri or Assistant, but its ability to control other apps is limited, as is its applications for more general web searches. To put it simply, Bixby lives on your phone, while Google Assistant and Siri live in the cloud.

Bixby Home Is More Annoying Than Useful

The second pillar of the Bixby interface is Bixby Home, a dedicated page on Samsung’s default launcher program. It’s accessible by swiping all the way to the left on the home screen, more or less exactly like Google’s Now Launcher. It can also be launched from any app with a quick tap of the dedicated Bixby hardware button (which can be disabled if you’re prone to accidental touches).

A left swipe isn’t the only thing Bixby Home has in common with Google’s implementation. The service appears to want to be something of an omnibus for the smartphone experience, bringing together functional apps like weather and alarms, integration with Samsung services, breaking news and sports alerts, and quick links to frequently-used apps and shortcuts.

It seems to want to be something of an ethereal home screen alternative, organically bringing up information and applications that you’ll want based on usage context. But unfortunately, it’s less helpful than it would like to be: I’ve found that simply using my preferred launcher and home screen widgets is much more practical in almost every situation. Bixby Home has something of an identity crisis: while the full-page interface for Google Assistant is all about delivering information and Siri is all about accepting commands, Bixby Home wants to do both of those things and launch apps and recommend new activities, on top of more bizarre additions like Samsung shopping rewards and a gamified “experience” system. It is, frankly, a mess. I’ve disabled the button functionality on my phone.

Bixby Vision Has Real Potential

The third portion of Bixby is the most interesting, and holds the most potential. Bixby Vision is a supplement to the stock camera app, activated by pressing the “Bixby Vision” button while shooting. The program uses AI (or so it claims) to almost instantly identify contextual information in the image, bringing up relevant web results with either a general image search or a specific shopping program. It can also analyze photos in your gallery or in Samsung’s Internet browser.

This tool can be useful if you happen to see something that you can’t immediately identify from context—say, a painting in a gallery with no label or caption, or a car that you happened to spot as you’re passing on the bus for which you can’t quite remember the model name. At the moment it mostly relies on results from Pinterest and Amazon.

This stuff is, to put it bluntly, really cool. The problem is that it’s highly contextual: the times when you’d need it aren’t altogether obvious, and it’s not something that would sell phones all on its own, the way Apple’s highly-marketed Siri does. And it’s not alone, either: Google’s Assistant will soon get extra functionality called “Lens” that does basically the same thing.

No Need to Choose

Bixby is in its infancy as a service: right now it’s only supported on three phone models, with only two languages for voice actions (Korean and English), and its integration with third-party apps and services is far behind the likes of Alexa. But Samsung is a giant in its field—in dozens of fields, in fact—and has the money and the muscle to make Bixby a competitor by sheer force of will. We’ll have to wait and see if the company doubles down on Bixby integration in its flagships for years to come, or if it’s just a novelty left by the wayside of tech history.

Fortunately, there’s nothing forcing current users of the Galaxy S8 and Note 8 to choose between Bixby and Google’s more general Assistant. Both of them are built into the Android phones, and though Google is saving some of the juiciest functionality for its Pixel devices, it’s still quite easy to use Assistant’s home button or voice activation functions.

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How to Manage Windows 10’s New “Power Throttling” to Save Battery Life

Windows 10 now performs “Power Throttling” of applications, even traditional Windows desktop programs and background processes. By limiting the CPU available to background applications, Windows 10’s Fall Creators Update can increase battery life on laptops and tablets. You can tell Windows not to perform power throttling for certain processes if this causes a problem.

Why Windows Now Slows Some Programs Down

Modern CPUs have a variety of power states, and can use a low-power mode that is much more energy efficient. When you’re using an application like your web browser, Windows would like to get maximum performance out of your CPU so the application works as fast as possible. However, when applications are just running in the background, Windows would like to put the CPU in its low power state. That background work will still get done, but it will happen a bit slower and the computer will use less power to do the work, increasing your battery life.

To ensure maximum performance for the applications you’re actually using, Microsoft has “built a sophisticated detection system into Windows”. The operating system identifies applications in the foreground, applications playing music, and other categories of important apps, ensuring they won’t be throttled.

If an application doesn’t seem to be important to the user, Windows marks it as available for power throttling. When only these less important processes need to use the CPU, Windows puts it in a low power state. On previous versions of Windows, the operating system wouldn’t be able to transition to that low power state because it treated those background processes the same as foreground processes. Windows now has a way to tell which are important.

This detection process may not always work perfectly, so you can check which applications are marked for Power Throttling and tell Windows they’re important if you don’t want the operating system slowing them down.

This feature is designed to boost battery life on portable PCs, so it’s not used on desktops or on laptops when they’re plugged in. It’s only used when a PC is running on battery power.

How to Check Which Processes Are Power Throttled

Use the Task Manager to check which processes are power throttled on your system. To open it, press Ctrl+Shift+Esc or right-click the taskbar and select “Task Manager”. Click the “Details” tab to view a detailed list of the processes running on your system. If you don’t see the tabs, click the “More details” option first.

In the Details pane, right-click the headings and click “Select Columns”.

Scroll down through the list and enable the “Power Throttling” column. Click “OK” to save your changes.

You’ll now see a Power Throttling column here, which will give you information about each process’s power throttling state. You can drag it around to reposition it, if you like.

If Power Throttling is disabled on your system—for example, if you’re on a desktop PC or laptop that’s plugged in—you’ll just see “Disabled” in this column for every application.

On a portable PC running on battery, you’ll likely see some applications with power throttling “Enabled” and some applications with it “Disabled”.

We saw this in action with Google Chrome. When we had Google Chrome minimized in the background, Windows set Power Throttling to “Enabled” for the chrome.exe processes. When we Alt+Tabbed back to Chrome and it was on our screen, Windows set Power Throttling to “Disabled” for it.

How to Disable Power Throttling System-Wide

To disable power throttling, just plug your portable PC into a power outlet. Power Throttling will always be disabled while the PC is plugged in.

If you can’t plug in right now, you can click the battery icon in the notification area, also known as the system tray. Adjust the power slider to control Power Throttling and other power usage settings.

At “Battery saver” or “Better battery”, Power Throttling will be enabled. At “Better performance”, Power Throttling will be enabled but will be less aggressive. At “Best performance”, Power Throttling will be disabled. Of course, the Best Performance setting will increase power usage and lower your battery life.

How to Disable Power Throttling for an Individual Process

You can also tell Windows to disable Power Throttling for individual processes on your system. This is particularly useful if the auto-detection feature fails and you find Windows throttling important programs, or if a specific background process is important to you and you want it to get maximum CPU resources.

To disable Power Throttling for an application, head to Settings > System > Battery. Click “Battery Usage by App”.

If you don’t see a “Battery” screen here, your PC doesn’t have a battery—which means Power Throttling will never be used.

Select the application you want to adjust here. If an application has “Decided by Windows” underneath it, that means Windows is automatically deciding whether it should be throttled or not.

Uncheck the “Let Windows decide when this app can run in the background” and “Reduce the work app can do when it’s in the background” options here. Power Throttling will now be disabled for that application.

While we’re using Google Chrome as an example here, we don’t recommend disabling Power Throttling for it or any other process unless you have a good reason to do so. This setting will only slow Chrome down when it’s running in the background and will have no effect when you’re actively browsing. The result is improved battery life with no drawback.

In fact, if Power Throttling works properly and never slows something down when you care about it, you should never have to tweak it at all.

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How to Maximize Battery Life on Your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch

So you got yourself a shiny new Apple device, but you’re so addicted that the battery is running out way too soon—what you need is a couple of tips to keep your battery running for as long as possible, and we’ve got them here.

Many of these tips are going to be common sense, and won’t be a surprise to the more geeky readers, but now you’ll have an article you can send to your less geek friends and relatives when they ask you how to improve their battery life.

Keep Your iDevice Out of the Sun

Whatever you do, don’t leave your iPhone or iPod sitting in a hot car—heat kills batteries faster than any other factor, and your device that used to keep a charge for hours will eventually barely hold a charge, and you’ll have to pay Apple to get it replaced. The same thing holds true for any really hot environment: try and store your device in a cool place.

Reduce the Screen Brightness

If you keep the screen at maximum brightness all the time, you’re wasting a lot of battery life—and the screens these days are so bright anyway that you don’t really need to, especially at night. Head into Settings -> Brightness & Wallpaper to adjust the default level of brightness, which you can probably keep as low as 30% most of the time.

Make Sure the Screen Locks Quickly

Even if you’ve adjusted the screen brightness, there’s still no substitute for having it turn off quickly when you’re not using it. Head into General -> Auto-Lock to set the screen lock to happen as quickly as your device will let you. This makes a big difference if you are always picking up your phone and putting it back into your pocket without turning the display off.

Use Airplane Mode When You Don’t Need Internet (iPad/iPhone)

If you’re busy spending the next 8 hours playing Angry Birds, there might not be a good reason to have internet access, so you can consider using Airplane Mode, which turns off both Wi-Fi and the regular wireless radio. Of course, this will prevent phone calls if you’re on an iPhone—but if you’re busy with Angry Birds you probably don’t want the interruption anyway.

Use Wi-Fi Instead of 3G if Possible

According to Apple, the iPad will get 10 hours of battery life under regular use with Wi-Fi enabled, but will only get 9 hours using 3G—the iPhone gets 6 for 3G and 10 for Wi-Fi. Of course, if you’re heavily using the Wi-Fi, you’ll still be draining the battery—the point is under similar workloads, Wi-Fi is better than 3G for battery life.

Reduce or Eliminate Mail & Calendar Checking

If you’ve got a bunch of email, calendar, or contact accounts configured, and they are all being checked and downloading email on a regular basis, you’ll be draining the battery an awful lot faster than you need to.

Reduce or Eliminate Push Notifications

Do you really need notifications from Twitter or whatever other apps you’re running? You can turn these off one-by-one, or turn off Push entirely by heading into Settings -> Notifications, and save a bit of extra battery life since your device won’t be pulling in data for those applications anymore.

Reduce or Eliminate System Sounds

This one is probably a little silly, but if you really don’t care for the system sounds you can save a small amount of battery life by removing the sounds. A very, very small amount, most likely. Head into Settings -> General -> Sounds to change them.

Disable Location Services

If you don’t really need the location services, you can disable them to save some battery life. Head into Settings -> General and flip the Location Services setting to off.

Disable Bluetooth If You Don’t Need It

If you don’t use a Bluetooth headset or keyboard, you should keep the Bluetooth radio disabled to save some extra battery life. Head into Settings -> General -> Bluetooth to flip it on or off.

Disable Vibrate Feature in Games

If you’ve got a game that uses the vibrate feature, you can turn that off to save some battery life. This mostly matters if the game heavily uses it, and you’ll need to change the setting for the game. As a side note, and it should go without saying, if you’re running really intensive video games, they will kill your battery very quickly.

Discharge Your Battery Occasionally

It’s a good idea for your battery to be fully discharged and recharged at least once a month to calibrate the battery life estimate and keep it from dying without warning. You’ll also want to make sure that you don’t store the device with a dead battery, as that can also cause the battery to lose charge capability—when your battery dies, make sure to recharge it quickly.

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Debunking Battery Life Myths for Mobile Phones, Tablets, and Laptops

Batteries need to be cared for properly — they’re a critical part of our mobile devices and battery technology hasn’t advanced as fast as other technologies. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of incorrect information about batteries out there.

Some of the big myths come from old battery technologies and are actively harmful when applied to new battery technologies. For example, nickel-based batteries needed to be fully discharged, while modern lithium batteries shouldn’t be fully discharged.

Perform Shallow Discharges; Avoid Frequent Full Discharges

Old NiMH and NiCd batteries had a “memory effect” and had to be completely discharged from 100% to 0% to keep their capacity. Modern devices use Lithium Ion batteries, which work differently and have no memory effect. In fact, completely discharging a Li-ion battery is bad for it. You should try to perform shallow discharges — discharge the battery to something like 40-70% before recharging it, for example. Try to never let your battery go below 20% except in rare circumstances.

If you were to discharge your battery to 50%, recharge it, and then discharge it to 50% again, that would count as a single “cycle” with modern Li-ion batteries. You don’t need to worry about performing shallow charges.

There’s only one problem that shallow discharges can cause. Laptops can get a bit confused by shallow discharges and may show you wrong estimates for how long your device’s battery will last. Laptop manufacturers recommend you perform a full discharge about once per month to help calibrate the device’s battery time estimate.

Heat (and Cold) Can Damage Batteries

Heat can reduce a battery’s capacity. This affects all types of devices — even smartphones heat up when performing demanding tasks — but laptops can become hottest of all when under load. The battery is in the laptop, near the electronics that become hot while working heavily — this contributes to battery wear.

If you have a laptop that you use plugged in all of the time and it gets quite hot, removing the battery can increase the battery’s life by limiting the battery’s exposure to the heat of your laptop. This won’t make too much of a difference in normal use, but if you’re using a laptop to play a lot of demanding games and it’s heating up quite a bit, it may be helpful. Of course, this only applies to laptops with removable batteries.

Your climate is also a concern. If it gets very hot where you live or you store your device somewhere that gets very hot — say, a hot car left in the sun on a summer day — your battery will wear down faster. Keep your devices near room temperature and avoid storing them in very hot places, such as hot cars on summer days.

Extreme cold temperatures can decrease the lifespan of your battery, too. Don’t put a spare battery in the freezer or expose any device with a battery to similarly cold temperatures if you’re in a region with cold temperatures.

Don’t Leave the Battery At 0%

You shouldn’t leave the battery in a fully discharged state for very long. Ideally, the battery wouldn’t discharge all the way to zero very often — but if it does, you should recharge it as soon as possible. You don’t have to race to a power outlet when your smartphone dies, but don’t throw it in your drawer and leave it there for weeks without charging it. If you let the battery discharge completely and leave your device in a closet, the battery may become incapable of holding a charge at all, dying completely.

Store Batteries at 50% Charge

On the other hand, leaving the battery charged fully for an extended period of time could result in a loss of capacity and shorten its life. Ideally, you’d store the battery at 50% charge if you weren’t going to use it for a while. Apple recommends you leave the battery at 50% if you intend on storing the device more than six months. If you’re using it regularly, you shouldn’t need to worry about its state — although you never want to leave a battery at 0% for too long.

Storing the battery while fully discharged could result in the battery dying completely, while storing the battery at full charge could result in the loss of some battery capacity and shorten your battery’s life.

This applies to both batteries in devices and spare batteries you may have lying around — keep them at 50% if you won’t be using them for some time.

Leaving Your Laptop Plugged in All The Time Is Okay, But…

This one appears to be fairly controversial. We’ve previously covered the eternal question of whether it’s okay to leave your laptop plugged in all the time. We concluded that it’s okay and the battery’s temperature is the main thing you need to worry about. Apple disagrees, recommending against leaving its Macbook Air and Macbook Pro notebooks plugged in all the time.

Ultimately, we’re both saying the same thing. It’s fine to leave your laptop plugged in at your desk when you’re using it, as the laptop won’t “overcharge” the battery — it will stop charging when it reaches capacity. However, just as you shouldn’t store your laptop’s battery at full capacity in a closet, you shouldn’t leave your laptop plugged in for months on end with the battery at full capacity. Allow your laptop’s battery to occasionally discharge somewhat before charging it back up — that will keep the electrons flowing and keep the battery from losing capacity.

Battery University says that “the worst situation is keeping a fully charged battery at elevated temperatures.” If your laptop produces a lot of heat, removing it might be a good idea. If you have a fairly cool laptop that you occasionally let discharge a reasonable amount, leaving it plugged in — even for days on end — shouldn’t be a problem. If your laptop gets extremely hot, you may want to remove the battery, as we mentioned above.

Batteries Will Always Wear Down

Like all other types of batteries, Li-ion batteries will wear down over time, holding less and less charge. Apple says its laptop batteries will reach 80% of their original capacity after “up to” 1000 full discharge cycles. Other manufacturers commonly rate their batteries 300 to 500 cycles.

The batteries can still be used after this point, but they’ll hold less electricity and will power your devices for shorter and shorter periods of time. They’ll continue losing capacity the more you use them. Heat and aging will reduce the battery’s life, too.

Whatever you do, your devices’ batteries will slowly wear down over time. With proper care, you can make them hold a long charge for longer — but there’s no stopping entropy. Hopefully, your device will be due for an upgrade by the time its battery dies.

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The Complete Guide to Improving Android Battery Life

Once upon a time, you had to really keep an eye on your Android phone to make sure the battery wasn’t being depleted prematurely. Manually toggling connections, constantly adjusting brightness, and the like are basically all things of the past now—but there are still things you can do to maximize your handset’s battery life.

Before we get into the how, however, let’s talk about how far Android has come. Back in Android 6.0 Marshmallow, Google released a new feature called Doze Mode, which promised to improve battery life by “forcing” the phone into a deeper sleep when it’s not in use—leave it lying on the table or desk for a bit, and Doze would kick in, saving you precious juice.

Then, with Android Nougat, they improved this even further by making it a bit more aggressive: instead of kicking in while the phone is completely still, Doze now works while the phone is in your pocket, bag, or anywhere else it isn’t in active use. This means fewer apps will take up precious resources on your phone when you aren’t using it, translating to longer battery life.

With Android Oreo, Google implemented a new set of features called “Vitals” that, among other things, aim to intelligently limat background activity in order to save precious battery life.

And so far, it works exceptionally well. There’s just one problem: not everyone has Oreo, Nougat, or in some cases even Marshmallow. If your handset happens to be forever stuck on Lollipop or KitKat (or older), there are still some things that can you do to make sure you’re getting the most life out of the battery.

If you do have one of the newer versions of Android, however, the following will also apply, though to a somewhat lesser extent. We’ll cover some of the newer features—like Android’s built-in Battery Optimizations—further down below.

First: Know Where to Check Your Usage

Look, this may seem like common sense, but I’m going to say it anyway: if you think your battery is draining faster than normal, look at your phone’s battery stats! This is very, very simple: just pull down the notification shade, tap the cog icon (to go to the Settings menu), then scroll down to the Battery section.

One some devices—like most things from the Samsung Galaxy series, for example—this will just show you a basic screen with some estimates. While those are marginally useful, you’ll want to hit the “Battery Usage” button to see the real meat and potatoes here.

On this screen, you can see what’s chewing through your battery, complete with a nice graph and a breakdown by app or service. If there’s an app causing issues, this is where you’ll see it.

But wait, there’s more! What many users may not realize is that if you tap on the aforementioned graph, you’ll get a detailed look at when the device is awake—or “wakelocks” as they’re generally called.

There’s a really simple way to read this screen: the bars show when each particular sub-head is “on.” Since I never disable my phone’s Wi-Fi, the screenshot above shows that Wi-Fi is always on and connected. Same with Cellular network signal. But as you can see, GPS, while always on, isn’t being used.

The “Awake” indicator shows when the phone was allowed to come out of a sleep state—this is what you want to pay close attention to. If this bar is basically solid and “on” all the time, that means something is keeping your device awake all the time, which is bad. You want to see very short bursts on the “Awake” bar while the display is off. (If the screen is on—which you can easily see from its status bar below—then the phone will naturally be awake as well. It’s not going to sleep while it’s being used, after all.)

If you’re seeing something different here, then there’s a problem. And, unfortunately, there’s no easy way to diagnose wakelocks without rooting your phone, which makes it difficult for casual users to diagnose battery issues. (If you do have a rooted phone, you can use an app called Wakelock Detector to pinpoint the problem.)

Lastly, in Oreo, Google brought back the option to “show full devices usage.” That means you can switch between seeing which apps are using the battery, and hardware stats for battery usage. To show this, tap the three-dot overflow menu in the upper right corner, then select “Show full device usage.” To switch back to app view, do the same thing and select “Show app usage.”

By switching back and forth between the two, you’ll be able to better determine what (if anything) is acting out of the ordinary.

In Oreo, Nougat, and Marshmallow: Check Android’s Battery Optimization Settings

In modern versions of Android (which I generally think of as Marshmallow and newer), Android has some built-in battery optimizations. While most of these are enabled by default, it never hurts to check and make sure everything is working as it should.

To access these settings, jump back into the battery menu (Settings > Battery), then tap the three-dot overflow menu in the upper right corner. From there, select “Battery optimization.”

Disable Wireless Connections

Look, I’m not going to pretend that this is going to make a monumental difference in your mobile battery life, but I’m going to say it anyway: disable Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS if you don’t need them.

See, this used to be a very important step in optimizing your Android device’s battery life, but as time has gone on and Google has improved Android, it’s almost unnecessary at this point. Still, if you never use something like Bluetooth, turning it off isn’t going to hurt anything. It’s also worth mentioning that if you do disable Wi-Fi when you’re away from home, don’t forget to turn it back on—you don’t want to chew through your data plan, after all. To toggle Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, pull down the notification shade and tap the appropriate toggle, or jump into Settings and then into each service’s respective entry.

Check Notification Settings

You’ve probably heard that notifications can drain your battery, but as with all things, it’s a bit more complicated than that. These days, the majority of apps use Push Notifications. Instead of constantly monitoring for new notifications (which is very taxing on the battery), push notifications use an always-listening port that’s built into Android to receive information. In other words, instead of the app connecting to the internet every several minutes to see if there’s any new information, Android is always ready to accept new information from services that are enabled on the device. This is far more battery efficient because it’s a passive service.

There are, however, still apps out there that rely on non-push notifications. The biggest offender is generally going to be email services that still rely on POP3—while these are likely few and far between at this point, they’re still out there. A few social networking apps may do something similar.

Use Greenify to Automatically Put Apps into Sleep Mode

While this is admittedly more relevant on pre-Marshmallow devices, it’s still a useful tool to have in your arsenal against terrible battery life. Greenify is an app that essentially pushes apps into a “sleep” state of sorts by using Android’s built-in way of preventing apps from running constantly in the background. It is not a task killer, even though it may sound a bit like one—it’s much more effective.

Keep the Device Out of Extreme Temperatures

This one can be a bit trickier because it’s not just a tweak or toggle—it has to do with where the device physically is. Extreme temperatures—both hot and cold!—can cause the battery to drain much faster.

For example, let’s say you live in a hot climate (like Texas, for example). It’s July and you jump in your car, toss your phone in a dock, and fire up Navigation. That means your GPS is in use, the display is on, and it has the hot sun beating down on it. That’s a recipe for disaster—the device will run hot because it’s working hard, and when you throw that hot sun into the mix it can be catastrophic to your phone’s battery life. In fact, I’ve seen devices lose charge while plugged in under this exact situation. It’s that bad.

Do Not Use Task Killers or Fall for Other Battery Myths

Lastly, it’s important to know what not to do. Lesson number one: don’t use a task killer. I don’t care what anyone says, just don’t. This is a very, very old-school way of thinking that goes back to the day when Blackberries were the hottest things on the planet and mobile operating systems were simply inefficient.

While it may seem like a good idea to stop apps from running, it’s not! A lot of times, they’ll just start right back up, which will actually kill more battery than it saves. Task Killers completely disrupt the way Android is supposed to work, so not only does this not positively impact your battery life, it negatively impacts the system as a whole. Use Greenify instead—it handles background apps much more gracefully.

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