How to Make your Laptop Consume Less Power |
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Adjust Energy Settings – Virtually every laptop in the market features adjustable energy settings. Even when there are no default energy settings, laptop owners can still make their systems consume less power than usual. The first thing to do is to configure your laptop to sleep after a certain period of idleness. This ensures that it does not stay on consuming so much power while Windows displays the screen saver. Configuring your laptop to go into sleep mode after a period means that your work will be transferred to system memory and the system goes into a state of idleness wherein the processor, hard disk, screen, Cd-rom are turned off to save energy. These three components are the most energy sapping on any LAPTOP BATTERY and you can derive further energy savings from them. On recent Windows Operating Systems, Microsoft instituted power saving options allowing consumers adjust their PCs to fit their own energy saving policies. On Windows Vista for example, consumers are able to choose one of 3 to 4 energy policies. The names of these energy policies tend to vary per device manufacturer but the more common names are “Power Saving”, “Balanced”, “High Performance” and “Recommended”. For Windows Vista users, Power Saving is the mode to choose when you want to get a couple extra minutes on that battery of yours. Before we continue, please note that adjusting these policies requires a good amount of technical knowledge. Tampering with these settings in a defective manner will bring unwanted results. - On the Desktop, Click the Start Button - Go to Control Panel - Then Power Options - Choose your preferred power options - or Create a new one (for advanced users only) When creating a new policy, under power options you should be able to adjust with administrative access the number of minutes it takes to turn off the hard disk and display unit in battery and normal mode. You cannot turn off the processor but some models will allow you choose power saving settings for this component. To derive further savings dim the screen to taste. Turn Off WiFi & Bluetooth– The Wireless network cards on your laptop are the 4th and 5th contenders for high power consumption devices after the three chief culprits already mentioned. With this in mind it pays to turn off wi-fi whenever you are not surfing the internet with a Wi-Fi connection, this also applies to your Bluetooth network card. Turning off both devices in battery mode will help you get even more value from your laptop battery. |
