KludgeHack

Top 15 Ways to Extend Your Laptop’s Battery Life

I recently found on Lifehacker a nice article from the Friedbeef’s blog, about 15 ways to extend the laptop battery life. Here are a few of those I think are the most useful:

• Defrag regularly -  The faster your hard drive does its work - less demand you are going to put on the hard drive and your battery.
• Dim your screen - Most laptops come with the ability to dim your laptop screen.  Some even come with ways to modify CPU and cooling performance.  Cut them down to the lowest level you can tolerate to squeeze out some extra battery juice.
• Cut down on programs running in the background.  Itunes, Desktop Search, etc.  All these add to the CPU load and cut down battery life.  Shut down everything that isn’t crucial when you’re on battery.
• Cut down external devices - USB devices (including your mouse) & WiFi drain down your laptop battery.  Remove or shut them down when not in use. 
• Add more RAM - This will allow you to process more with the memory your laptop has, rather than relying on virtual memory.  Virtual memory results in hard drive use, and is much less power efficient.
• Run off a hard drive rather than CD/DVD - As power consuming as hard drives are, CD and DVD drives are worse.  Even having one in the drive can be power consuming.  They spin, taking power, even when they’re not actively being used.  Wherever possible, try to run on virtual drives using programs like Alcohol 120% rather than optical ones.

You can find the full original list here, with both 15 tips and two bonus tips, and even some good ones spread at the comments…