Extend your laptop’s battery life in 5 minutes

View your battery power

The amount of life left in your battery is shown by the icon in your Windows 7 notifications area, or your system tray if you’re using an older version of Windows. By clicking on the icon you can see the exact length of time your battery has left, as well as your current power plan.

Turn off wireless

As well as changing your power plan and seeing at a glance how much power you have left, you can also use Windows Mobility Center to turn your wireless networking on and off. When you’re not connected Windows will sniff to see if there are networks you can connect to, which drains battery. Turning wireless off altogether will save you heaps of juice.

Change Power Options

By left-clicking on the battery icon, you’ll be able to see this menu. We’ll look at the Windows Mobility Center shortly, but for now, just select Power Options, which is a one stop shop for the way Windows works, and consumers power on your laptop. Coincidentally, the other option on this menu enables you to turn icons on or off in the notifications area.

Select a power plan

The Power Options window lets you change settings that affect how your laptop consumes power. You can conserve energy when you need to be frugal and get a boost when you need more performance.

Change a plan

You can choose any of the plans shown or create your own using the option provided in the main window. Your laptop might also have a bespoke power plan created by the manufacturer that isn’t necessarily the best for consuming power. You can change any of these settings.

Advanced settings

There is also a ‘Change advanced power settings’ option. This enables you to change other power options normally micro-managed by Windows, such as the time after which it rests your hard disk. Such tweakings may affect performance, but will also boost battery life.

Dim your screen

This is probably the most important step of the lot – your display is responsible for a lot of the power drawn from your laptop.

You can dim your screen using the function keys on your keyboard, whcih will be marked like the ones in the picture.

Some laptop screens have been known to account for up to 40 per cent of the power used at any one time, so its well worth using this feature whenever possible. You can even set your power options to turn off the screen after a couple of minutes of inactivity, which is as power-efficient as it gets.

Remove peripherals

Take out USB peripherals or memory sticks, which use your PC’s power to function. They’re a huge drain on resources, so make do with using the trackpad while you’re working away from the mains.

Remove CDs and DVDs

If there’s a disc in your drive, then it will spin regularly so that Windows can see if it’s still present, and offer you the correct information. You guess it, spinning the drive taxes your battery, so take discs out to save prolong your battery’s life.