Battery Life Saving Tips: An Extremist’s Guide

February 9th, 2010 by Avram Piltch, LAPTOP Online Editorial Director  

You’re on an airplane. You’re in the park. You’re nowhere near an outlet, and you desperately need to squeeze the maximum endurance out of your notebook so you can finish what you’re doing before your PC’s energy well runs dry. You’ve probably heard that certain tricks—such as lowering your screen brightness all the way or changing your wallpaper to black—can give you a few more crucial minutes of battery life, but do any of these things really work?

To find out, we took four possible battery-saving settings and measured the effect each one had on our test notebook, the Toshiba Satellite M505. This Intel Core i3 system’s initial time on the LAPTOP Battery Test was more than a little disappointing. On our standard test, which features continuous Web surfing over Wi-Fi at 40-percent brightness, the 14.0-inch laptop lasted a measly 3 hours and 11 minutes. We made the following changes and measured the effect each had on that initial time.


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5 Responses to “Battery Life Saving Tips: An Extremist’s Guide”

  1. KW Says:
    February 10th, 2010 at 6:41 am

    One thing you left out is agressive settings for the display to turn itself off. When on battery I’ve got the display turning off if I don’t use the machine for 5 minutes. I’ve developed the self-discipline (most of the time) to leave it off till I really need it again. I believe this helps quite a bit although I haven’t tried measuring it.

  2. wildbill Says:
    February 13th, 2010 at 8:39 pm

    My netbook (Sony Vaio X) has a “Wireless OFF” slide-switch. I don’t know what impact its setting has on battery life, but I would expect that if you can turn off all NIC and wireless (including GPS) this would save a lot of power; is this also true for Bluetooth? A strange thing: my laptop’s power-management software creates an all-”white” wallpaper background rather than all black. Intuitively I would have expected “all black”. Maybe this setting depends on the type of LCD display, e.g. this particular netbook’s pixels are “wide open” (transparent) when not driven/powered, whereas perhaps other LCD displays’s pixels are the inverse–”closed” (opaque) when not driven/powered. In either case to decrease power we want the display-driver components to be as inactive as possible; this includes reducing backlighting to as dim as possible.

  3. Douglas Says:
    February 15th, 2010 at 8:00 am

    Some things that I’ve found that help: turn the brightness right down, turn all wireless off, remove any optical media, unplug unnecessary devices, switch to Windows Classic, drop the resolution to 1024×768 (looks best if you can turn of display scaling so that it appears as a box on the middle of the screen as opposed to a distorted mess) and use in a room that’s reasonably cool (to prevent the fans from coming on all the time). This has helped me extend battery life a little bit more.

  4. DavidF Says:
    June 5th, 2010 at 11:14 am

    Nice article. I was in total agreement (almost predicting what your results would be for the tests) … until, that is, I reached the end. The article’s last page suggests that they (power saving effects) all happen when you switch to a high contrast theme and that is why you get the same result (ok, you said ‘similar’) as all three when you switch to a high contrast theme, but that is not correct. You gained 25 minutes from the high contrast change when nothing else was changed, not 19 minutes. 6 minutes difference is slightly less than one third or one quarter (depending how you want to see it) of the overall difference. I would call that significant. If you tested in the order that you reported I would be inclined to think your overall battery life is, noticeably, less than it was at the start of the tests.

    If you are testing things like processing power and Aero effects, shouldn’t you be doing something more than pulling up webpages on a wifi connection? I would think some task bar hovering, perhaps opening and closing a few apps, and possibly some use of codecs would be a better test. I understand you have the one battery test you prefer and use as your standard, but if I am trying to squeeze the most out of my battery (with only one boot up) I am going to be switching between multiple windows and using the task bar. Would it not also be better to;
    (1) use multiple testing models/brands
    (2) a longer lasting laptop/battery combination

  5. DavidF Says:
    June 5th, 2010 at 11:19 am

    Edit: 1st line 2nd paragraph;
    If you are testing things like processing power and Aero effects …
    should read
    If you are CHANGING things like processing power and Aero effects …

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