How To Improve Laptop Battery Life

Battery life is still one of the single most important issues that people consider when purchasing a new notebook. But what can you do to extend the battery life on the laptop you own now? Cycle through our top tips for improving notebook battery life and save that laptop from the landfill for another year.

Read the full content of this Article: http://www.notebookreview.com/news/how-to-improve-laptop-battery-life/

 

I did not know that the optical drive is a power hog. You learn something new every day
Thanks for the guide

 

Sometimes my laptop says optical drive power on

Even though there is no disk in there, is there a way to turn this off? As surely this is using and draining power for no reason...

 

That was a good read...thanks for the review.

 

If your laptop uses a slot-loading optical drive then sometimes those are set to automatically turn on and check for a disc at various times (such as during Windows startup, or wake from sleep) but your drive shouldn't be doing anything if it's a tray-load drive and there is no disc in the drive.

In theory you can disable the optical drive via the Device Manager (Control Panel, Hardware and Sound, and select Device Manager under "Devices and Printers"). Just right click on the drive and select "Disable."

If the drive is disabled under the Device Manager it shouldn't be powering up completely (although it will draw "some" amount of power as long as it is connected). Drawing "some" power while idle isn't a problem but optical drives consume a great deal of power when the drive spins up, the laser is reading/writing data, and the CPU and GPU are working to display whatever is on the disc.

 

I disagree with turning off the automatic updates for battery life simply because I figure most people will totally forget about it if they don't get at least the toasters you get from "Notify but don't download". Unless a drastic difference in battery life can be shown, which I doubt. But generally, yes, all the main points are covered.

 

This is all extremely basic; figure people on these forums already know these things.

It does cover the basics though; for non-geeks.

And does a good job of it.

 

Yes, this article isn't really intended for our forum regulars (although sometimes even the basic stuff can serve as a helpful reminder).

We get some substantial traffic from Google searches for basic tech advice like this so we like to update our beginner-level help articles every year or two just so those newcomers get the latest and most relevant information when they visit NBR.