Don’t you love it when you first get your laptop or smartphone and the battery lasts for many hours without a single charge? That power disappears pretty quickly after just a few battery life cycles. Your device used to last 24 hours; now you carry your charger everywhere you go. Let’s try to bump that battery back up to a full day’s worth. Here’s some helpful practices to keep that precious battery life lasting a little longer.
Eliminate Programs Running in the Background
Program overload is a battery killer. Constantly running programs like iTunes adds to the CPU load and hampers your battery life. Shut off any programs you are not currently using.
For iPhone users: Double click your “Home” button, hold down an icon in the bottom bar until icons shake, hit the minus sign to delete programs running in the background. This won’t delete the app, just turn it off.
For Android users: Go to “Settings”, then “Battery” to see what programs have you reaching for a power outlet. Click “Force Stop” to shut down the app.
Lower Your Screen’s Brightness
Dim the brightness and contrast of your smartphone or laptop as low as you can without straining your eyes. Unless you are outside at high noon, there’s no reason to waste your battery power on brightness.
Turn Off Location Services
Tracking applications are not only slightly Orwellian, they are also one of the worst battery life offenders. Your phone must check with nearby cell towers every single second with location services turned on, creating a major drain on the battery.
Charge Early and Often
Once upon a time, there was a thing called battery memory, where it would be smart to discharge your battery completely before recharging your phone. That is a thing of the past. Now you take care of your battery by not letting it drain all the way off. Try to prevent your phone from dipping below 10 percent.
Avoid Extremes of Temperature
Intense heat or cold ruins your battery over time. Obviously hot batteries discharge much quicker than room temperature batteries. Keeping your laptop in your hot car all day is an electronic death sentence. The very last thing you want is a battery literally exploding out of your Macbook and on to your lap like this poor soul:
Remove Attached Devices
Anything connected to your laptop will diminish the battery faster than without any attached devices, like a USB hard drive or a computer mouse. This includes using your laptop to charge your smartphone, which takes longer to power up via laptop than charging from a power outlet.
Add More RAM
Additional RAM lets laptops process more with the memory it contains, instead of virtual memory. Heavy virtual memory usage requires hard drive use, which is something to avoid for a stronger battery.
Turn Off Push Notifications
Do you really need your phone lighting up every time you get an e-mail or a Facebook comment? Kill those notifications and manually check your social networks and e-mail.
Don’t Charge Laptop For Long Periods of Time
A bad idea would be to leave the battery in your laptop while using an power outlet for indefinite periods of time. This keeps the battery in a constant state of charging, which (I’m sure you can guess by now) reduces the battery life cycle.
Airplane Mode
If situations get drastic, and you get down to the bottom of your battery, there’s always “Airplane Mode” to help you out. Airplane mode turns off all forms of wireless communication. You won’t receive calls, texts, e-mails, or any sort of data. Depending of your usage, you could get a few days out of your smartphone. But then again, it wouldn’t be much of a smartphone, would it?
Did I miss any power saving tips? Share yours in the comments and as always follow Surpass on Twitter and Facebook for news, contests, and other fun stuff.
Jared S is Surpass’ Technology Writer. Add him on Instagram and Twitter.
Very good tips Thanks for giving the good tips of make your laptop more healthy and safe, These instruction will be very much helpful if you will make the habit of these thing in your daily routine.