I am on the planes a decent amount of the time (100,000 miles by late May) and tend to spend a chunk of my flights using my laptop. Most of the time it’s productive, but it can also include a DVD or the occasional game (either Nethack or Battle for Middle-Earth 2, which are obviously similar). When I was a-hunting for a laptop, battery life was a key criterion in my selection process, as was weight. While I like my Vaio VGN SZ-160P, the standard battery was lasting about 3 hours (the extended life clocks in under six hours before my tweaks), not enough for the SFO-JFK route (now switching to SFO-EWR as a default due to Manhattan traffic, which is a huge bummer because United’s P.S. flights have standard AC outlets on board).
So I did a lil’ Googlin’ for tips on extending battery life, and I found them all pretty, well, lacking. Stuff like “don’t try to do real-time 3d rendering” or “fully charge up your battery before flying.” One of them even said “buy an extra battery.” Not exactly helpful (Sony’s tips are in the picture on the right). The most common tip that I’ve found truly deceptive is on disabling wireless: many claim it makes a huge impact to disable it, but personally I’ve only noticed a minor difference. I do in fact disable it (and Bluetooth) but on my Vaio the difference was about 10 minutes over 3 hours (but as I state below, it all adds up).
Alas, I’ve gone and done a lot of experimenting and have a list of my tips to really maximize battery life for my laptop.
Key to this process is having some good methodology. While testing, I kept a plain text file on my Desktop (creatively called “battery.txt”) tracking the real clock as well as Windows’ expected battery life. The problem with the Windows tool, is it really just tells you the current state of the battery based on the current system activity. This means if you start with 3 hours remaining then spend 30 minutes doing something that rapidly consumes the battery, you’ll be down to 2 or less. In other words, you need to track the actual history/lifespan of your battery if you want to get the best information out of your system. You can check out my little tracking file for inspiration.
And now, with no more delay, here’s Jeremy’s Tips for Maximizing Your Battery, or How to Fly From San Francisco to New York City With an Average Battery and Not Have to Watch an Ernest Goes to Anywhere Movie):
- Brightness: how low can you go? Without any question, the fastest way to suck the life out of a battery is leaving your brightness high. Turn it down as low as you possibly can without needing to up your glasses prescription. On my Vaio, I can select from one of 8 levels. During one test, at brightness level 3 my system reported 60% full, with 3:52 (all times are hours:minutes) of life to go. I switched up to level 5 and in 17 minutes of use, I was down to 52% full, with 3:06 to go. In other words, 17 minutes used 46 minutes worth of battery (all other variables were held constant). You can even be so bold as to lower your brightness all the way down when sitting idle for a minute or two (for example, if you are writing a long blog post and pause to clarify your thoughts before typing).
- Don’t use any external devices. USB and PC-Cards (aka PC-MCIA) use your battery to function, even when you aren’t using them! Have an EVDO card or maybe a USB mouse? Remove them if you can. Even a memory card reader in your PC-MCIA slot uses power just by being in there. The effect varies based on the type of device, but even a few minutes here and there (as you’ll see) add up significantly.
- Single-task, not multi-task. The more you are doing at the same time with your PC, the more memory and CPU usage increases. Both of which directly use up battery. Close any applications you aren’t using, even the small ones. When doing some experimentation, I found it more efficient to run a single application at a time, then close it and open a new one when ready to move on. While your hard drive uses the battery too, if you are doing anything ‘productive’ you are probably hitting the drive on a regular (even if infrequent) basis anyway.
- Keep it cool. You can take a page out of the extreme gamer’s handbooks, and have your system perform more optimally by keeping it cool. Make sure your air vents (inflow and outflow) aren’t blocked by anything, which often occurs by poorly positioning your notebook on your lap (which is known to have some other side-effects too, by the way). Heavy CPU and memory use all contribute to heat as well, hence my comment on multi-tasking above.
Shut down unused services. MSN Messenger, Google Desktop Search, QuickTime, wireless managers, etc. They’ve all gotta go. You probably aren’t going to use them, and they all eat up valuable resources. Especially things that ‘scan’ anything. For advanced users, I also recommend launching Windows Task Manager and getting rid of anything not used in-flight. In fact, I put together another little text file with a list of all the services I don’t use, and I go down the list and manually shut down each one. If you really want to get this one right, a little bit of research is in order. While online, I launched the task manager (control-shift-escape) and for each service that has my User Name, I googled it. There are a few good web sites out there which chronicle what all these mysterious services do, and you should be able to figure out which you need, and which you don’t. Important warning: if you aren’t comfortable with this lingo, you should skip this step, or get some techie friend to help you out. Less important warning: you may end up in a situation where you need to do a reboot after you get to your destination.
Do Hibernate, Do Not Suspend. I’ve found that my Vaio tends to use way too much battery when in suspend mode. Not sure why, but the ‘instant-on’ effect isn’t worth the extra 30-60 seconds it takes to get out of hibernation. Furthermore, the minor hit to the hard drive is unlikely to have a significant impact to your overall battery time. Also, if you weren’t aware, going in and out of hibernate is much better than a full startup/shutdown sequence. Note that you might need to manually enable Hibernate as a system option (once you have, the quick shortcut into it is ‘windows button’ followed by U followed by H, and some PCs will have even faster shortcuts available as well). If you make a run to the bathroom, however, that’s worth a quick Standby, but anything over 10 minutes and I’d Hibernate instead.
Tweak advanced settings. Virtually all laptops manufactured in the past 24 months have some advanced power options. Mine, for example, allows me to go into 16-bit color mode, force the CPU into a power-saving mode, disable my LAN port, and more. This might seem obvious, but if you aren’t doing it already, go find these settings (probably in the control panel, or possibly through custom software provided by your manufacturer) and get aggressive with them! If you don’t have any extra control, one good extra tip is to manually force your screen into lower color modes, as they use less CPU overall and can make a huge difference in the long run. While you are at it, you might want to change your Alarms settings, as many laptops default to shutting down with as much as 10% of your battery still available (my Low Battery is just an alert at 5%, and my Critical is force hibernate at 1%)!
- Choose Wisely. Good: Word, Excel, Outlook, Text Editors. Bad: anything by Adobe (you think Microsoft has bloatware, have you noticed how long even Acrobat takes to launch these days???), all Google plugins, many ‘Widgets’, ‘Gadgets’, etc. All I can say is pick your battles wisely. 50 minutes of a video game ate up over 2 hours of my battery time, whereas writing email or documents tend to use up less than what Windows predicts (about 105% of the estimate on average). I’ve also found WinDVD is right on the money for battery consumption, and Windows Media Player is a little power-hungry (by the way, if you are using your laptop to play music make certain you disable visualizations). On that note, don’t use your laptop to play music unless absolutely necessary, it’s a real resource killer.
- Watch That Hard Drive. I just wrote, don’t play music, but the reason is mostly about your drive. The more it spins, the more power it takes. Make sure you’ve set your basic power option to turn off your drive relatively fast, but not necessarily too fast. Some drives use more power getting started than staying running for short periods of time. I set my Vaio to turn off the disk after 3 minutes of inactivity, you may want more, you may want less. At the end of the day, if you are doing anything that prevents the hard drive from spinning down ever, you are draining your battery more than needed.
Like a Boy Scout, Be Prepared. I make a point of configuring my ‘flight mode’ prior to getting on the plane. It may only take 5-10 minutes to get your system setup properly, but that just eats into your battery life if you wait to do it on the plane. Once done with all the settings, the last thing I do before unplugging my power supply is hibernating the PC.
I hope some of these tips help you out. Personally, I add around 30 minutes (or more) to the longevity of my standard battery (3:30 on average now), and almost an hour on the extended one (6:30 or so). This gives me almost 10 hours of combined life (4 full DVDs guaranteed), which suits me quite well.
I manually kills ports/featurs I won’t need to squeeze extra life out. Bluetooh, IR, even the regular old network adapater get disabled. (On a plane I’ll obviously also kill WiFi.) I also rip DVDs to the hard drive and mount the image – while I haven’t done any scientific testing, I’m assuming spinning the hard drive uses less battery than spinning the optical drive.
Kevin Tofel gifted me with an external battery which has been good for 4-6 extra hours. It adds weight to my backpack, but it’s well worth it. The battery tucks nicely into the magazine pouch on the plane with the cord going to my laptop on the tray table. Sadly, if I move on to a MacBook soon there isn’t a MagSafe power adapter as far as I know.
Though with increased security at airports this month, I’m thinking about just leaving the laptop at home for next weekend’s trip to Florida and Labor Day in Vegas. But how will I blog?!
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Would noise cancelling headphones also help? I’ve found that I really have to crank up the volume to hear a DVD in flight. With my noise cancelling headphones I can keep the volume at a normal level.
Since it’s just a 3.5mm (?) plug to the laptop and you’re not using speakers I wonder if the volume makes a difference.
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Regarding the hard drive, you could disable virtual memory to eliminate some read/write activity. (Only if you have plenty RAM ofcourse)
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I use my laptop as a media player in flight. I have added almost an hour to my dell D600. I do it using a Linux Live disk and using my 4 gig flash drive as storage. With the dell D series the hard drive just pulls straight out. No no power consumption via HD. I use GeeXbox as the live disk. It boots up, I plug in my flash drive, move the video into memory, then unplug the flash drive, sit back and relax. I have my videos in Xvid format and have a gig of ram. GeeXbox is set up to not use and processor multipliers. So my dell is running at 600mhz running all off of ram, and at the lowest brightness.
Cody Blotske
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Great ideas, but here’s one that will really save:
http://www.virtualcd-online.com/
Basically this device let’s you rip your CDs and DVD to the hard drive. You media stays at home and your movies go with you on the hard drive. You remove the DVD drive itself, thus preventing any chance it’s motor will eat more battery. I’ve used this product since revision 2.0 and it rocks!! I have 20 internal “drives” with multiple “virtual” CD and DVD images.
A *much* more accurate way would be to open up the Windows Performance Monitor. My laptop tells me exactly how many watts it is currently using, and how many watt-hours are left in the battery. (ACPI BatteryStatus/DischargeRate and BatteryStatus/RemainingCapacity counters.)
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Nice write up.
My experience with getting good life out of your battery is to properly train it.
i’ve found that not leaving the AC plugged in longer then you need seems to help, or actually removing the battery if you are going to be running the PC from AC power for a long time.
Let the battery drain out before you charge it.
These things should help ‘train’ the battery to last it’s longest.
Like a Boy Scout, Be Prepared. I make a point of configuring my ‘flight mode’ prior to getting on the plane. It may only take 5-10 minutes to get your system setup properly, but that just eats into your battery life if you wait to do it on the plane. Once done with all the settings, the last thing I do before unplugging my power supply is hibernating the PC.
As indicated in Tip #7, Power Settings exist. If a computer is booted while plugged in, it is running in optimal performance mode. Unplugging the machine does nothing to some of the power settings; they remain set for optimal performance. Things like suspending the OS or the backlight for the screen are changed, sure. But the processor is still running as fast as possible.
Booting a machine on battery will slow down the processor and retain battery life.
Right click on My Computer, go to Properties and note your processor speed. Shut down and boot up on battery power and check the properties. The processor speed listed should be significantly lower.
-SMcG
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USB 2.0 Bug You can save battery life by applying this patch, see the article.
a) The Battle for Middle Earth II expansion pack, The Rise of the Witch King, is coming out. I’ll have a preview published somewhere soon. Get those batteries charged is the short version.
b) Dave Zatz: If that’s how that cookie crumbles, I can take that defuncted battery off of your hands with no problems! ^_^
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Jeremy,
Don’t do this by hand, create a batch script to stop the services you don’t want and to kill the processes that aren’t managed as services.
For each service add a line to a .bat file that reads:
net stop XXXXXXXWhere XXXXXX is the shortened “Service Name” displayed for the service in the Services under Administrative Tools.
For all remaning processes, use:
taskkill /f /t /im XXXXXXwhere XXXX is the process executable with the extension but not the path to the file, e.g.
taskkill /f /t /im abc.exefor batery saveing on laptops if your on the go windows allows you to make mutiple device profiles for your computor so you can select them at start up this. Iv done this so i have 3 options a full one a portable one being all serill ports and usles network devices tured off and a extended life profile with nothing actiovated no wifi or anything this rellay saves battery.
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Cool!China laptop
To prolong battery life and laptop life, simply place your laptop on the itopad,either on your lap or tha table. There is continuous airflow under the laptop moving the heat to the sides.
Try it, you will be amazed!
Thanks for the tips. I’m a laptop repair tech and sometimes my customers ask me the same question: “How to increase the laptop battery performance?” Now I can link them to this post and save my time. 🙂
Is it true that you should always charge the battery on laptops when the battery is very low to get full potential of battery life and i would live to know how long is a standard battery life.
^ no – this isn’t true for new li-ion batteries.
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yee,very good,I’m the webmaster of shop-batteries.com,many customers ask me how to extend your laptop battery life,then I can interview they to here now
Excellent and very well written article. We sell batteries on our site SimpleMicro.com and lots of customers keep asking us about how to maximise the life of their laptop battery. Some info is on our site, and we’ll foward some customers to this page.
Hey Jeremy,
Thank you for this outstanding article. We specialize in external battery packs which give laptops and tablets up to an additional 30 hours of run time per charge and we also inform our laptop battery customers that adding additional RAM to thier laptops whenever possible is also a smart idea to prolong their battery life. The reason is the more RAM they have installed in thier laptop, the less their hard drive needs to spin.
All the best,
Sean Murray
President & CEO
The Battery Geeks
“Home of the 30+ Hour Per Charge External Laptop Battery Packs”
http://www.batterygeek.net
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One tip; when saving documents, use a USB Pen Drive. This device uses static Flash memory as opposed to a spinning Hard Drive.
This is a great way to save battery life!
Some battery tips from this website
Battery Maintenance and Use Instructions
1) A new battery usually comes in a discharged condition with a very low capacity. It is highly recommended to fully charge new battery packs before use. Refer to the users’ guide of your electronic device for charging instructions.
2) A new battery pack needs to be circled (fully discharged and recharged) three to five times to reach its optimum performance.
3) Rechargeable battery will undergo self-discharging when left unused for a long period of time. Thus, it should always be stored in a fully charged state and kept in a cool, dry and clean place.
4) To maintain the optimum performance of a battery pack, it is highly recommended to circle (fully discharging and recharging) it at least once a month.
5) It is normal if a new battery gets warm when being charged or used. However, close attention should be paid if the battery pack becomes excessively hot. This may indicate there is a problem with the charging circuit of the electronic device. So, it is necessary to have it checked by a qualified technician.
6) New batteries are hard to be charged. Sometimes, your electronic device may indicate a fully charged condition about 10 to 15 minutes when the new battery pack is being charged for the first time. When this happens, remove the battery pack and let it cool down for about 10 to 15 minutes then repeat the charging procedure. Sometimes, a new battery will suddenly refuse to be charged. If this happens, it is then suggested to remove the battery from the device and reinsert it.
For battery, shopping, knowledge, g good value site, http://www.discount-battery.eu.com
This is a good article.
I just want to add an explanation to your question.
“Do Hibernate, Do Not Suspend. I’ve found that my Vaio tends to use way too much battery when in suspend mode. Not sure why…”
In Suspend mode, laptop uses the SDRAM and not the HD.
The HD is shut down but the SDRAM need to be refreshed and all DRAM are very power hungry.
Also note that file fragmentation can have a negative effect on battery life. An article on the intel website mentions that with fragmentation, the power consumption of the drive increases drastically. I think this is because the drive has to do more work when files are scattered on the platter compared to if they were contiguous. Fragmentation also reduces performance, so it’s like a double punch to the notebook – it runs slower yet has lower stamina.
Ive found using higher capacity batteries is a good way to go, that way you dont have to comprimise your laptops performance. I found a high capacity battery for my Thinkpad at http://www.portableparts.co.uk, they seem to have a decent range.
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I have found using higher capacity batteries is a good way to go, that way you dont have to comprimise your laptops performance.
Those are all great tips! Another thing would be to turn it off when your not using it.
i will try it,thanks,very nice tips
I got it the day Verizon released it and shipped the battery back for a new one because they said the release ones some had an inferior battery.
Hey the article is a pretty good one…but the author has not specified anything about the charging habits the user must stick to in case to extend the battery life…..i did not go through all the replies but if someone has already posted a note on that please let me know….thanks and a great article!
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Some battery tips from this website
Battery Maintenance and Use Instructions
1) A new battery usually comes in a discharged condition with a very low capacity. It is highly recommended to fully charge new battery packs before use. Refer to the users’ guide of your electronic device for charging instructions.
2) A new battery pack needs to be circled (fully discharged and recharged) three to five times to reach its optimum performance.
3) Rechargeable battery will undergo self-discharging when left unused for a long period of time. Thus, it should always be stored in a fully charged state and kept in a cool, dry and clean place.
4) To maintain the optimum performance of a battery pack, it is highly recommended to circle (fully discharging and recharging) it at least once a month.
5) It is normal if a new battery gets warm when being charged or used. However, close attention should be paid if the battery pack becomes excessively hot. This may indicate there is a problem with the charging circuit of the electronic device. So, it is necessary to have it checked by a qualified technician.
6) New batteries are hard to be charged. Sometimes, your electronic device may indicate a fully charged condition about 10 to 15 minutes when the new battery pack is being charged for the first time. When this happens, remove the battery pack and let it cool down for about 10 to 15 minutes then repeat the charging procedure. Sometimes, a new battery will suddenly refuse to be charged. If this happens, it is then suggested to remove the battery from the device and reinsert it.
Well. Great tips here. But I have another one.
Forgive me for being frontal, but if you want real power saving buy a Mac. With the same platform as Sony SZ that states 3h30m, my Macbook with Penryn processor just passed the 4h15m, with a bluetooth mouse, wi-fi for net connection, and 3h with an external monitor plugged in. I’m still surfing with 12 minutes estimation of use.
Goodbye Windows world forever…
I have a Toshiba Satellite, and my battery power only seems to live for 2 hours. (and yes, I turned down my brightness and I even put it on power saver mode) Yet, my battery is still losing power pretty fast. Also, this is a new laptop.
Yesterday I charged it for almost 10 hours with out using it! And for the first 2 hours its already at 39%! So would this be considered a bad laptop or just a bad battery?
Please reply soon. Thanks.
thanks.. i just got an hp and i didnt know how long my battery was supposed to last.. 3 hours is kinda short but can a battery be OVER charged because i keep my laptop on the charger all day..
Anyone know whether watching a movie from usb memory stick is less power hungry than running the movie from the hard drive?
How to discharge and charge laptop battery ?
A typical charge and discharge cycle is as follow:
1. Install your newly purchased battery into your laptop
2. Disconnect the AC adapter and use your laptop until it itself shuts down. In this situation, the battery is fully discharged.
3. Connect the AC adapter and your battery should start charging.
4. Charge until the battery is full.
Repeat this charge and discharge cycle a few times and your battery pack will be conditioned to perform at full capacity.
Note: Please do not overdischarge and overcharge your battery.
Great tips! I think I should also do all of these ideas with my Dell XPS M1210 battery. I think your ideas can really maximize the performance of my laptop battery. Thanks for sharing! 😉
I have a Toshiba Satellite, and my battery power only seems to live for 2 hours. (and yes, I turned down my brightness and I even put it on power saver mode) Yet, my battery is still losing power pretty fast. Also, this is a new laptop.