How to Extend Laptop Battery Life

When you need to work or stay connected on the go, there is nothing more useful than owning a laptop.  However, this will not do you much good if your laptop battery only lasts 30 minutes.  The average laptop battery lasts between three and four hours, but this varies greatly based on how the owner uses their laptop.  If you want to learn how to extend laptop battery life, you have come to the right place.  You can use these five helpful tips every time you use your laptop to noticeably extend the life of the battery.

The first tip is to alter your power settings.  This can make a huge difference, which many people forget about.  If your laptop is running a system like Windows XP, Vista or Seven, you should have power/performance options.  When you need your battery to last longer, put the setting to power saver instead of high performance.
Next, take it easy on the lights and sounds.  Unless you are working outside in the bright light, you should turn down the brightness of your screen, an easy way to know how to extend laptop battery life.  You might not consider the battery power required to play sounds, but unless it is truly necessary, it is best to turn off sound altogether to extend the battery’s ability to power your computer.
Another tip is to disable themes and screen savers.  A standard look will be far less taxing to your battery, even if it does not look as cool.  Themes and screen savers are purely aesthetic.  Back when monitors could have images burned on them when left on one screen for too long, screen savers prevented this.  Its popularity never died out even though they are completely unnecessary today.

The fourth tip is to maintain your hard drive.  By defragmenting the files on your hard drive, you will conserve space and your processer will work better, faster, and with less energy.  Investing in a laptop with a faster processor will require less of your battery, helping you know how to extend laptop battery life.
The final tip is to detach everything you are not using from the laptop.  Every gadget like your mouse, speakers, CDs, flash drives and keyboards suck the power out of your battery.  Remove what you do not absolutely need.  Now that you know how to extend laptop battery life, see what you can get from your laptop this time.