You’re away on business and you’ve forgot to pack your laptop charger so what do you do? Your presentation should last a couple of hours and you’re worried your battery just won’t work. Short of asking your potential customer if they have a spare charger, here are some quick tips to help you increase your battery life:
- Decrease the screen brightness
You can actually save a great deal of ‘juice’ simply by reducing the brightness of the screen. Every system is different, but typically a notebook would have a battery icon in your task bar to the bottom-right-hand side of your screen. Simply click on it and then select the options for screen brightness. This may actually be in the different power profiles your operating system has arranged for you. Reduce it to a level you’re comfortable with. - Forget the screensaver
Generally you’ll be using the computer whilst you present, but if you’ve stopped to chat about some points then you wouldn’t want to waste the battery on showing a screensaver, allow the laptop to hibernate if necessary. To do this you may just need to click on your desktop and change the display options. - Disabling start-up programmes
For some reason we seem to build up a list of programmes that start up when you sign in. They all take up battery power loading up and even running in the background. Just use what you need. - Avoid running a CD or DVD
Having an optical drive running can use up a great deal of power, if you limit their use then you can extend the battery power significantly. - And the same with USB devices
Many USB devices such as scanners gain their charge from the host laptop. It’s unlikely you will have one of those attached during a presentation, but have a look at what you do have plugged in. - Change your power saving options
Modern operating systems give you a whole host of options to save power. These include putting the notebook to sleep to turning off the display or just dimming it after a short time. Have a think about how much you’ll use your laptop during the presentation or day and go for the most aggressive power saving option you can. - Use the fan less
Of course, if you’re sat in a hot room then the fan will have to be used more often to cool the laptop down. If you can, open a window or turn the air-con down. Also double check to see if the fan vent is blocked, and clear it out if necessary. - Turn off Wi-Fi
If you can live without Wi-Fi or Bluetooth then turn it off. - Turn off search indexing
You probably can live for a day without having a super-fast hard drive search feature. You can use the laptop’s control panel to turn this off. - Disable the scheduled tasks
I’m sure you have many tasks running such as backups etc. For the day you could turn these off.
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