How can I optimize laptop processes so that the battery lasts longer?
This can be done by adjusting the power settings of the device correctly.
Today I will tell you how you can significantly increase the battery life of your laptop using simple techniques.
The principle of successful energy saving is the rational use of the limited energy of the laptop battery. You can do this by adjusting your power settings correctly and by taking a smart approach to choosing the applications you use most.
First of all, we are talking about applications such as a browser and video player. Naturally, when launching energy-intensive applications (3D games, graphic video editors, etc.), we will hardly be able to achieve the desired result. By the way, I recommend reading my article “How to find out which app is the most draining battery in Windows 10”, follow this link.
As a rule, when working only in office mode, a laptop consumes about 15 W, which is an average of 220-240 minutes of work without recharging. Let’s try to increase this indicator using simple settings.
Power settings
Let’s start with the basic power settings. Go to Windows Control Panel and select Power Options.
From the proposed options, select the “Energy saving” scheme and click on the “Power supply scheme settings” link. Then select “Change advanced power settings”.
In the window that opens, we will make certain settings. They will help increase the operating time of the laptop under light load conditions.
1. Hard disk
Select “Turn off hard drive after:” and set the value to “5 minutes”.
This will save about 1.5 watts of electricity, which is approximately 10 minutes of extra time for laptop battery life.
2. Wireless network
In the settings of the wireless network adapter, I advise you to select the “Medium power saving” mode. This will also have a positive effect on the overall operating time of the gadget.
Select the Maximum Power Saving mode only as a last resort, as it significantly reduces the signal strength of the wireless adapter, which will inevitably lead to connection problems.
3. Sleep mode
In the “Disconnect after:” item, set the value “5-10 minutes”, in the “Sleep after” item – the value “30-60 minutes”, in the “Allow the use of hybrid mode;” – “Off”.
4. PCI Express bus
The PCI Express bus connects components such as the GPU, SATA controller, and wireless adapter.
In the “Maximum Power Saving” mode, the bus is able to lower the clock speed or even turn off completely, which will save additional time when the notebook is “sleeping”.
5. Processor
The clock speed of the processor in the “Maximum performance” mode increases, which significantly reduces the battery life of the device under prolonged load.
If you reduce the performance of your laptop by 50%, it will consume 10 watts less, which translates into an additional hour of battery life.
6. Screen
In the item “Dim the monitor after:” set the value “2 minutes”, and in the item “Monitor brightness during eclipse:” – “10%”.
Effective programs
Typically, the most commonly used applications are the browser and video player. Choosing energy-efficient programs can increase your laptop’s battery life by up to 30%.
According to statistics taken from ichip.ru, where an example was taken as a sample, when they started playing a full-length 1080p movie (Lenovo X 201 laptop, Intel Core i5-M540, Windows 7) on YouTube and watched the MP4 video file, and then measured the power consumption, it turned out the following results.
As you can see from the test, the VLC player and Internet Explorer browser became the most energy efficient application. If the autonomy of the gadget is in the first place for you, then we use this software as the main one.
Disable animation
When you normally scroll a web page line by line (using the down arrow button), its content is continuously updated, which leads to additional consumption of the already limited energy resources.
If instead of scrolling, we use page-by-page navigation (the “Page down” button), the information on the screen will be updated much less frequently, which will have a positive effect on energy efficiency, which means it will save us precious minutes of autonomy.
You should also disable animation. Now I will show you how to do this using the example of the Mozilla Firefox browser.
Go to “Settings” – “Advanced” – “General” and disable the option “Use smooth scrolling”.
This is about the browser. Now let’s get to the operating system.
Click on “Start” – “Control Panel” – “System” – “Advanced System Settings” – “Advanced” – “Performance” – “Options” – “Visual Effects” and select “Provide Best Performance”.
Utilities
Along with the settings and the choice of programs, the mode of its use also affects the battery life of a mobile computer. You can use hardware voltmeters to check power consumption, but it’s easier to use the official utilities that laptop manufacturers offer.
For example, Energy Management, Intel Power Cadget (Lenovo), Power4Gear Hybrid (Asus) and others, depending on the brand of your laptop.
Finding energy problems
There is such a thing as “Windows timer”. This is the frequency with which the operating system calls the processor to perform a task. The default Windows timer period is 15.6 ms, or 64 hits per second.
If any of the installed programs on your system begins to increase this frequency on its own, it will inevitably lead to increased power consumption, which ultimately affects the drain on the battery.
As an example, the Google Chrome browser, which, with all its advantages for maximum performance, by default changes the Windows timer and often unnecessarily starts to consume the energy resources of your device.
These and, possibly, other power consumption problems will be prompted by a special command, or rather, by the console utility powerсfg.exe. I will not go into details of working with this tool due to its complexity now. However, I will give an example of its one useful function for identifying power problems.
Close all programs and documents. Run Command Prompt as Administrator.
Enter the command: powercfg / energy
In just 60 seconds, the utility will find system problems related to energy efficiency and save the report as an HTML document. By default, the report is saved to the C: \ Windows \ system32 \ folder.
You can open this file (HTML document) using your browser. After executing the command, read the prepared report on power consumption problems and recommendations for resolving them.
Following the recommendations, correct settings and a reasonable approach to the choice of the applications used will use all the reserves of the battery and significantly increase the battery life of the laptop.
In some cases, the gain from a correctly optimized power consumption mode under the condition of an insignificant load can reach plus 2 hours. That’s all for that. Happy optimization!
