Laptop Power

Dim the Screen

One of the biggest power drains for the laptop is lighting the screen. When you are using the laptop, lower the lighting level to conserve power. Different computers do this in different ways depending on who the manufacturer is, but most have a function key and increase and decrease brightness buttons. You can also shorten the time of idleness required before the screen turns off by editing the power options. A blank screen requires less energy than a lighted screen.

Turn Off Wireless Card

The wireless card in your laptop requires a large amount of power to search for and receive Internet signals. If you are not in an area that has a wireless signal or are not using the Internet, turn the wireless function of the computer off. You can do this by going to network settings and disabling the wireless adapter.

Use Standby and Hibernation

Standby mode turns off the monitor and hard drive and stores the open programs in the RAM memory. This reduces the amount of power needed and still allows you to resume whatever you were working on very quickly. You will want to save your work before going into standby mode because if power is lost, anything saved in the RAM memory will be lost as well. Hibernation saves all of the information to the hard drive and then turns off everything, conserving even more power than standby. The downside to hibernation is that it takes longer to resume than standby. To set your computer to go into either of these modes, either use the Start menu and select the mode you want to go into, or set your computer to enter one of these modes when you close the lid of your computer.

Limit CPU Usage

To conserve power, minimize the amount of programs and processes that are running on the computer. To maximize the battery life, do not run programs like DVD players or online games because these will drain the battery very quickly. You can also decrease the number of programs that are running by closing any programs in the task bar, located at the bottom right of the screen, that you are not using.