What to do if you need your laptop urgently but can’t find a power socket nearby? You’re attending some important meeting or lecture, but you forgot the battery and your device is down to a miserable 2% charge – a quite realistic scenario indeed.
There are ways to prepare for a meeting where you are going to need your laptop, even if the charge doesn’t last for long. What can you do in such stressful situations? The essential tips to save energy and make your laptop run down more slowly are here:
Switch to power-saving mode
You’ll save a lot of energy and charging time by setting your computer to use less power (and by remembering to switch it off before you go to sleep, as many people do). It may make the laptop run slower and the screen will be less bright when you watch a movie, but this approach works.
Thanks to the extended charging time, you will be able to watch movies for up to 5-6 hours during a seemingly endless train or plane journey, whereas with the traditional settings you’d need to charge your system around 1-2 hours sooner.
The screen and keyboard light
It makes a big difference if you turn down the screen brightness and keyboard lighting a little. FullHD, for example, has a huge power draw, and a ‘diet mode’ will make your computer drain much slower.
Keep your device cool
The more you work on it, the more its temperature rises – like a volcano about to erupt. Ensuring that your laptop is at a normal temperature is a class-leading way to make it work more efficiently, and it has another advantage: a heat-free machine consumes less power, lasts much longer without charging. That’s why you need to pay close attention to the temperature and cooling of your laptop (true for PCs as well).
One of the main symptoms of a tired, failing laptop is when you feel the underside of it getting very hot. It’s probably the fans that are doing the cooling, because it’s their job to keep the temperature at a healthy level. If you experience this heat frequently, you should consider buying a cooling pad to put under your laptop – this can alleviate this symptom.
(Source)
Use as little software and apps as possible
An ocean of tasks may force users to run up to 5-6 applications on the machine at the same time. We get really busy installing software to boost efficiency. There’s just one gigantic problem with this: it puts a huge load on your laptop’s hardware, which is very power-hungry. The multitasking of this kind not only exhausts our own brains, it also drains the machine’s power supply – you’ll soon be looking for the laptop’s battery.
- Don’t open a gazillion tabs on your laptop at once before an unplugged business trip that lasts for hours.
- Don’t watch videos all day, because constantly activating the video card may reduce the charge to a critical level.
- Be selective: run only those applications that are really important and don’t significantly drain the battery.
Turn off the settings you don’t need
Don’t think you need Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or HDMI every second. Feel free to turn them off from time to time, and they won’t waste your computer’s power.
How do you save power when you leave your laptop alone for a few minutes?
You can also save a lot by putting your computer into hibernation instead of standby. Hibernation stores the current system settings in memory, which still eats up a lot of energy. Still, it is better: the current version is stored on the hard disk and there is no active power consumption.
Conclusion
So, to sum it up really quickly:
- Switch to power-saving mode on all systems that consume too much.
- Lower the power consumption of the screen and the illuminated keyboard.
- Keep your laptop cool. Check the fan regularly.
- Don’t run 5-6 or even more applications and the installed software simultaneously.
- Turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth when you don’t really need any of that.
And remember: a laptop will always consume less power than a PC. Most PCs require anywhere from 70 to 200 watts. Laptops have a much smaller appetite: they can use between 15 and 60. But no matter what your device is – type, year, power consumption – it will one day require special attention. In such a situation, contact the best electronic repair pros available.
