Ways to conserve your Laptop’s battery power

Windows Vista : Ways to conserve your Laptop’s battery power

Using Windows Vista can bring a total strain on your laptop’s battery power. Because of the new features of Vista, it’s a total power hog. First of all you need decent specs to run Vista and all that power and performance is putting a strain on my poor laptop. When running on battery mode here’s what I do.

Lower down your laptop screen’s brightness

one thing I noticed and always tried when using my laptop, when running on battery power I always lower down the brightness its really simple but if works quite effectively. Approximately 10 to 12% of your laptop’s power consumption goes to just running the backlight on your screen. By lowering down the screen brightness, you reduce the power consumption and ease the load on the battery. My laptop has keyboard controls for dropping and raising the screen brightness. Yeah I know it’ll be a dark a maybe harder to see, but still you’ll see everything. It’ll improve your laptop’s battery power for about 15 minutes.

Turn off AERO Theme

The first time I booted up on Vista, it made me drool… my initial reaction was “wow”, but after a day or two. The shimmer of the new AERO theme, just wasn’t there anymore. Sure it’s pretty, but that’s just what it is… a pretty theme.

The new Aero interface and its zooming windows and Glass transparency effect is cool but it has an impact on your overall laptop battery power.

To do this, right-click on the Vista desktop, select Personalize from the menu and select Windows colour and appearance from the list. Now choose Open classic appearance properties for more colour options. From the new Appearance settings window, select Windows Vista Basic from the list of colour schemes. Click apply and this will turn Aero off.

Turn off Wi-Fi /Bluetooth

When your not using your Wifi it’s better you turn it off, it will ease the strain on the battery and be able to divert the power to other parts of your laptop that needs power. Even our mobile phones / PDAs consume a lot of power when USing WiFi or Bluetooth. So when not needed it’s important to turn it off, so it won’t automatically search for WiFi hotspots or other bluetooth devices within it’s range.

Set a lower harddrive power-down time

If you’re not accessing your files from your harddrive it’s better to set it down to a lower number of minutes, set it down to 10 minutes. that should be enough, reducing the down-time on your laptop’s harddrive will allow it to power down sooner.

To do this, click on the Start orb go to Control Panel click on Power Options. Click the PowerSaver power plan option and then click Change plan settings. Then click Change advanced power settings. When the new Advanced settings windows comes up, scroll down the list until you find Hard disk. Double-click on it and again on Turn off hard disk after. Next to the new Settings option that appears, you’ll see a time rating next to “on battery”, typically 20 minutes. Drop this down to 10 minutes.

Reduce CPU performance

A new feature built into Windows Vista. You can now set the maximum and minimum performance levels of your Laptop’s CPU. By dropping the maximum performance percentage down to as low as you can afford, you’ll be reducing the amount of power it requires. The faster a CPU runs, the more power from the battery it needs so if you’re working on word processing, email or any application that really only uses a flick of processing power, dropping the maximum performance level is like putting a brick under the accelerator pedal of your car – it just makes sure you can’t use up too much gas all of a sudden.

To do this, click the Start orb go to Control Panel click on Power Options. Choose Change plan settings next to your chosen power plan and click Change advanced power settings. This time when the new Advanced Settings window appears, scroll down to Processor Power Management. Double-click on Minimum Processor State and you’ll see two entries – on AC mains and on battery. Double-click on the on battery option and check the setting. This will set the processor’s minimum CPU usage percentage. The lower this setting, the slower the effective speed of the processor and the less power.

Next, click on maximum processor state and again you’ll see two entries – on AC mains and on battery. Click the On battery option and again change the percentage setting. How low you set it is up to you but it should be higher in value than the minimum setting.

But when on AC power, you could unleash HELL and turn on all the cool features of Vista…hahha!

from the QuickStop