Battery conservation tips by Matt Klein

Battery conservation tips by Matt Klein, Small Dog Electronics

• Lower the display brightness all the way down. Doing this will generally double the estimated remaining battery life if you were set to full brightness beforehand.
• Disable keyboard backlighting.
• Ensure that Energy Saver is set to spin down hard disks when possible.
• Put your computer to sleep whenever you’re not actively using it, like when you’re on the phone, in the bathroom, or walking the dog.
• Eject optical disks. They spin almost all the time, taking power, even when they’re not in active use.
• Have lots of RAM installed. This helps prevent excessive virtual memory use (virtual memory is hard drive space that’s turned into virtual RAM. When the computer needs more RAM than is physically installed, it’ll dip into virtual memory reserves, and cause the hard drive to work more than it really has to.
• Use your iPod for music, not the computer; don’t charge your iPod unless absolutely necessary.
• Turn off auto-save features in your word processor. This feature spins up the hard drive all the time, consuming lots of power.
• Don’t keep unused applications running in the background.
• Mute the sound.

It’s not always practical to use your laptop is such a minimal way.

This was originally written for MacBooks. I have deleted Mac-specific tips. - tab

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