It happens many a time that when you need your laptop very dearly and you find to your horror, that your laptop is nearly dead. You look for a power source nearby and couldn’t find anything to get your laptop powered up and you still have plenty of urgent work to do on your laptop, probably an important email or an important PowerPoint presentation which you have to send to your boss or a client.

There are a few surefire things which you can do to buy more time on that almost-dead battery so that you can at least meet a deadline or respond to an important email before it’s too late.

Some of these techniques are for when you need to stretch your battery at that very moment, while others are preventative measures, best implemented before your battery life comes up short.

Short-Term Battery-Stretching Strategies

If you’re in a place where you can’t find a power socket to plug in your laptop charger, there are a few things you can do to enlarge the battery life instantly. None of these methods will in fact increase the amount of power left in the battery, but as a substitute will decrease the amount of power the laptop is using, letting you clutch in a few more valuable minutes before the battery goes defunct.

Activate Your Laptop’s Battery Saver Mode or Eco Mode: Designed with these types of situations in mind, most Battery-Saver or Eco modes will employ a number of automatic changes to extend usable battery life—numerous of the same changes we’ll be making here. This saved profile will fine-tune your laptop’s settings and shift gears into low-power states to help you consume your remaining battery power a little longer. Once you’ve turned on the automatic battery-saver tool, there is still plethora of steps to take to economize on even better competence. This is done by turning off needless devices, correcting settings to decrease power consumption, closing unwanted apps and processes, and aligning your activities to use less power.
Disable Unused Devices and Ports: The most convenient way to minimize power consumption is to plainly turn stuff off. Every constituent in your laptop requires power to function, but that doesn’t mean you need to power all of those components all the time. Begin by disconnecting any not required peripherals (like a USB mouse or external drive) and switching off the greatest power hogs, like graphics processors, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios, and unused optical drives.
WARNING: Prior to crippling any constituent or device, quit and ensure that this device is not in use, and that it is not necessary to ongoing operation of the laptop. For instance, you do not want to disable the hard drive that houses the operating system, or the processor that runs the whole laptop. Only put out of action those devices you are at ease switching off.

To put out of action idle devices on a Windows system, open up your system’s Control Panel and find the Device Manager. In the Device Manager, individual constituents are grouped by category. For instance, Network Adapters will often comprise both the LAN adapter, which provides Ethernet connectivity, and Wi-Fi, for wireless networking.

The four typical prospects for saving power on your laptop battery are the graphics card (found under Display Adapters), the Ethernet, Wi-Fi adapters (under Network Adapters) and the optical drive (found under DVD/CD-ROM Drives). Locate the device you want to close within the pertinent category. Right click on the device name, and choose “Disable” from the drop down menu.

You can also switch off any idle ports through the Device Manager. Just like an extension cord left connected to a power outlet, these idle plugs still have power going through them, and wasting some in the process. The real affect on battery life will be negligible, but if you want to stretch another minute or two of life, this will definitely help. Take a swift look at your ports, and switch off anything that’s not being used, like USB ports with not anything attached to them.

Adjust Your Settings: While you’ll still have to use the video display and the keyboard, you can correct the settings for each to minimize power consumption. One often ignored power exhaust is keyboard backlighting. Except you’re in the dark, and require the backlight just to distinguish each key, turn the backlight off completely. You can usually allocate a hotkey for this purpose.
The next big vent of your laptop’s battery power drain is your laptop’s screen. While you need to keep the screen up and running to use the laptop, you don’t actually require it running at 100% brightness or full resolution. A number of laptops have hotkeys for increasing and lessening the screen brightness, but if not, it can be corrected in the control panel. Adjusting the display to 50% when you’re running on battery power can add a noteworthy amount of time to your laptop battery.

In addition, if you’re merely typing up a document, you don’t require all of the detail offered by a 1080p or higher display. Adjusting the screen resolution to a basic 1,366×768 resolution or lower decreases the amount of power used in graphics processing devoid of negatively affecting your ability to work, letting your laptop work a little longer than at full resolution.

Lastly, switch off or turn down the sound on your laptop. If you still want to hear, decrease the volume as low as you can, and switch laptop’s larger speakers to a set of tiny earbuds to get the audio right to your ears. On every occasion possible, just mute the laptop on the whole. That way, the speakers won’t be receiving any power, and you’ll have some more precious time from your same battery.

Turn Off Apps and Processes: It’s not just the hardware that’s squeezing your battery juice, various apps and processes running on your laptop will also drain your battery quickly. In terms of hardware the advice is to turn off anything that isn’t being used.
In Windows, begin by taking a look in your System Tray, the assemblage of icons in the lower right corner of the desktop, in the task bar, next to the clock. On the left end of the System Tray in the task bar, select the icon to show hidden icons. See which apps are running in the background, open up the Task Manager by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc, or Ctrl+Alt+Del and select Task Manager from the menu. Once in the Task Manager, take a look at the open apps — you may discover that a program or two have been left running just as you forgot to close a window.

Next, go to the Processes tab. This shows you what processes are presently running on your machine. While some of these are required, some, like those linked with music and video players or cloud storage services (like Dropbox or Google Drive) can be disabled as they are not required at the time.

Simplify: You can also extend your laptop’s battery life by changing your own activities on your laptop. Multitasking is good when you have full power, but running a number of programs at once puts a larger load on the processor and your laptop consumes more battery. So, close those programs which are not required at the time and use only those programs which you need immediately.
Instigate by single-tasking—if you need to type up a document, close any extra programs running on your laptop. Turn off the Spotify still, if you want to keep some tunes going, immediately switch from streaming media to the songs on your laptop’s hard drive — your laptop will still be using some extra power to play them, but streaming media over Wi-Fi uses the laptop’s wireless radio which consequently consumes more battery power.

You can also save your power for a longer use on your laptop battery by switching to simpler tools for the same tasks, like opting for a simple text file (notepad) instead of a Microsoft Word document with lesser features and none of Word’s automatic actions (such as Autosave and Spell Check), you can do all the typing work you need without using quite so much power of your laptop’s battery.

In the situations where you need to keep your laptop’s battery alive for a longer time you should avoid a few activities entirely, like photo and video editing tools, which place a substantial load on the processor and graphics card, and resultantly consume more battery and are the real power hogs.

By doing away with avoidable power uses, you should be able to lengthen the life of your battery in those minutes that you find yourself high and dry.

Long-Term Strategies

These fine-tunes will help turning your system into a mean energy-efficient machine, adding to both the useful time you get the complete value and performance out of a single charge, and stretching the overall lifespan of the battery.

Care and Feeding of Batteries: It starts with taking care of the battery itself. If your laptop has a removable battery, make sure not to injure the battery contacts—they attach the laptop to the battery the power source for your laptop, and if the contacts get grubby or broken, it can decrease and interrupt the flow of power. You can clean the contacts off with a cotton swab, but damaged contacts should be repaired professionally.
Let your battery get drained completely occasionally through normal use so that all the cells in your laptop’s battery remain active, however, the modern laptop’s are designed in a way where your laptop goes on power saving mode and reserves a percentage of your battery power to let you start your laptop again and save the work you were doing when it switched off.

Other important thing is to, keep things cool. Heat can cut down the long-term life of the battery, so take measures to provide optimal airflow and cooling to your laptop while you work on it. The main problems come from physical obstruction of the ventilation ports, dust accumulating on the ventilation ports is another problem which you can remove by periodically cleaning the laptop’s vents and fan.

Always try to use your laptop on surfaces like table or desk or use a lapdesk if you want to use your laptop on bed because the pillows and blankets obstruct the ventilation fan and retain the heat coming out of the laptop which ends up in heating your laptop battery and processor, which is detrimental to the lifespan of the battery.

Tune-Up: The next step is keep your laptop tuned up for more effective consumption of power. A few easy maintenance errands and upgrades will not only help your battery work for you for a longer time, but they will also result in a faster performance of your laptop.
So, the first thing is to regularly defragment your hard drive to make data retrieval more resourceful and also clear the space on your hard drive. An active drive consumes more energy that an idle one, and defragging your hard drive minimizes the time to access data through an active drive. Eventually, as you add and delete files from your system, data is randomly recorded to the hard drive, dissipated in various places of the drive, this disorderly data, necessitates more time and power consumption to access that information. Windows 7 and Windows 8 both come with automatic tools that regularly defragment your drive, but you should make sure that this is enabled and running properly on your laptop.

Defragmenting your drive will also make it more effective. Practice good computer hygiene and remove the unwanted programs and cobwebbed files on a regular basis. Also, don’t forget to clean out the cache on your web browser and delete the old files from the downloads folder.

Upgrade Components: Another alternative is to dump the hard drive altogether, and upgrade to a solid-state drive (SSD). Solid-state drives use flash memory instead of a revolving disk, so there are no moving parts, and these offer more energy efficiency automatically. It also takes out the problems related with fragmentation, which is a more prominent problem with hard drives. Upgrading to an SSD will both increase your battery life, and put some energy in your system, as SSDs offer faster performance and start up times than their traditional counterparts.
Add some additional RAM to your laptop if possible. RAM stores data for frequent use in flash modules, much like an SSD. The more data that the RAM can store, the less dependent the system will be on perpetrating that data afresh from the hard drive every time. Again, plummeting hard drive activity cuts down the power consumption, like an SSD upgrade and adding RAM also has functioning advantages that you will discover instantly.

Battery Backup: At last, the simplest way to make sure that you always have adequate battery power is to carry along an extra; either a spare battery or an external battery packs (power bank). For laptops with a removable battery, the easiest alternative to ensure the constant power supply is a second battery. These can either be bought directly from the manufacturer, or from a third-party company. Simply exchange the old battery for the new once after a while when charging, and carry the charged-up spare battery on every occasion you expect to be away from a power outlet.
Another, best way is to buy an external power pack. While it is also in principle a battery, these external power sources plug into your laptop similarly as your charger does. These power packs come with adapters for use with various laptop models, and can be used even for other devices, like your phone or tablet.

Now, we hope that next time you will never get troubled in such a situation. Any suggestions or comments are welcome. Please feel free to do so in the comment box below.