Fight the power: How to get the most out of your laptop battery
Much to the disappointment of many professors, the majority of Northwestern students bring their laptops to class these days. Taking neat digital notes and having the internet as a resource are wonderful advantages over old-fashioned notebooks. Unfortunately, most laptops can only pull two or three hours of work. If you’ve ever had three straight classes in powerless lecture rooms (or if you’ve forgotten to charge your laptop before class) you’ve probably watched your computer click off mid-lecture. As a victim of the five-hour class block with a two-hour laptop battery, I found a lot of useful steps that every student can follow to make it through the day.
1. Ride the brightness
Every laptop has an adjustable brightness switch that allows it to turn the backlight on the screen up or down. The light that illuminates the screen is actually one of the biggest drains on the battery and needs to be treated as such. Always keep brightness at a minimum (making sure you can still see). In personal trials, I found about a 25-minute difference in battery life between running at full brightness and minimum brightness. Also, don’t be afraid to jockey the switch periodically. It can be very helpful to cut the lighting to zero during a long stretch of lecture that you just don’t think requires note taking. It happens. If you are pretty certain you’ll have such a grace period, you can also try putting it to sleep.
2. Put it to sleep
Your computer undoubtedly has a sleep mode or hibernate function that puts the laptop on standby, saving your work so that it will pop right back up once you wake the thing up again. This is especially important when power is low since sleep mode (Mac) or standby (PC) uses almost no power at all — just a touch to keep the RAM ticking.
3. Less wireless
Wireless internet reception takes a lot of battery life — several watts per day. Arguably the most efficient thing you could do to save power would be to keep the WiFi off whenever possible. Same goes for Bluetooth, which you may not even use unless you’re zapping pictures of Lolcats to your neighbors in class, so make sure that’s off at all times.
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