How Do I Improve My Laptop Battery Life?

You can never be too rich, too healthy, or too much battery life for your laptop. And you have to buy a notebook and get great stamina out of the box. You should try your best to squeeze as much time from your system as possible. Forum user EvilHamster wants to help find a program that provides a detailed power report that he or she can change settings or activities to improve battery life.

Windows Energy Report

Fortunately there are several ways to tell what hardware and software are using the most power in Windows. From version 7 on, Windows has a built-in report that measures energy consumption.

To generate this report, you simply run the command prompt as an administrator and type powercfg -energy and then press Enter. The software will then take 60 seconds to do its work and, when it finishes, you’ll have an HTML file called energy-report.html and it will be located in the C:\Windows\system32\ directory.

powercfg

Open energy-report.html in your browser and look through it to find programs that are using a lot of CPU resources and therefore draining power. When I created the report on my computer, Chrome browser showed up as the top resource hog. Considering that I was using Chrome with over a dozen tabs open when I ran the program, this isn’t surprising.

Using HWinfo to Track Power Usage

HWinfo provides a different way to measure power consumption. Once you download, install and launch it, make sure your laptop is unplugged and click the Sensors button. You can then scroll through the real-time report which shows several fields that detail the energy use of your CPU some other components, but sadly not the screen.

The best field to look at is the Hp 484170-001 laptop battery charge rate, which is a negative number of watts. Clearly, the lower that number of discharging watts, the better for your battery life. So try lowering your screen brightness, closing apps or even changing your power profile to see what lowers the discharge rate.

hwinfo

Whether you closely monitor your power consumption or not, here are a few tips that will help you increase your laptop’s battery life:

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