Have you bought a new windows laptop and it do not satisfy your battery needs? Than here is the quick guide to follow which will surely squeeze more juice out of your windows 8 or windows 8.1 laptop battery.
Few months back, I purchased new windows 8 laptop and it was running 8 to 9 hours once I get it full charged. But as time passed, I noticed a severe decrease in battery backup of my laptop. This is what happens with every laptop, It performs well in initial times but afterwards it starts showing its true colors! I was worried about this but after tweaking a bit with my laptops settings, I am now finally squeezing more juice out of my laptops battery. Do you want to increase battery life of your laptops too? Just follow simple below given guidelines and you will surely notice increase in battery life of your windows 8 or 8.1 laptop or tablets.
Guidelines To Increase Battery Life of Windows 8 or 8.1 Laptop
Change Power Plan
The default power plan of every laptop is balanced but it does provide many other power plans. To see power plans available on your laptop simply press Windows + C together and search “Power Options”. Open power options settings and you will see power plans available on your laptop. If you see there battery saver mode than select it and save the settings. Now if you don’t have battery saver options than you can also create a new power plan on your windows 8 or 8.1 laptop.
Steps to Create New Power plan –
- In Power Options window Click on “Create a Power plan” option on left side of windows.
- Give your power plan a name and it will also let you choose default settings of any existing power plan. You can choose any from available as we are going to change it earlier. Save your new power plan and click on “plan settings” of the new made plan.
- Go to “Change Advanced Power Settings” and there you will see list of things which utilizes your laptop’s battery. You can change setting of each of them as per your needs and increase battery life of your windows 8 or 8.1 laptop.
Reduce Brightness of Laptop Screen
Your laptop’s display eats up battery most than any other components do, so make sure you set brightness of your laptop as low as possible. If you are using your laptop in dark places than you should reduce brightness of your laptop as it is good for laptop’s battery and your eyes too. You can also change display time off settings in power plan settings stated above.
Shorten The Display Dim and turn off Time
When you are not using your laptop even for long period of time, your laptop automatically dims display and also turn it off. Well you can shorten the display dim and turn off time and get more squeeze more power from your battery.
Steps To Decrease Display Dim and Turn off Time –
- Open “Power Options” on your windows 8 or 8.1 laptop, on left side of that window click on option “Change when to turn off the display”.
- Reduce the time to minimum and save settings.
If you often went away keeping your laptop on than this tip will surely increase battery life of your laptop by 30%.
Disconnect unnecessary devices
Your laptop battery powers each and every component of your laptop and yes it also includes USB slots and DVD drives. If you keep CD or DVD in drive than it keeps on reading it and eventually you are loosing battery unnecessarily. The same thing applies to USB devices so one should have a good habit of disconnecting devices which are not in use.
Turn Wireless Devices Off
There are many people who don’t pay attention to bluetooth and Wi-Fi settings in their laptop. I would recommend to turn on this settings only when you need it. It not only saves battery of your laptop but it also secures you from people accessing your laptop remotely over the web! You can simply turn on Airplane mode to stop all wireless network services.
Hibernate your laptop instead of Standby
Hibernate is a much wise choice rather than putting your laptop to standby. Let me explain first what actually happens behind the scenes when you hibernate your laptop and put your laptop in standby mode. When you put your laptop into standby mode, your opened programs are still live in your RAM so RAM of your laptop keeps eating battery of your laptop. Now when you hibernate your laptop, all your programs which are loaded in RAM are saved to local hard drive of your laptop and your laptop shutdowns. Next time when you turn on your laptop it is switched back to where you last left off. In this way hibernating your laptop can help you to increase battery life on your windows 8 or 8.1 laptop.
Turn Off Automatically Changing Wallpaper and Screensaver
Enabling automatic changing wallpaper and screensaver may sound normal to you but it runs as a whole new process and it is executed by your processor every time your laptop reaches time limit. Your processor needs power to show you screensaver and change background images so you should turn this feature off to get most out of your windows laptop battery. You can change this setting by right clicking on your desktop and than select “personalize” in that find “desktop background”. There you can stop slideshow of wallpapers or you can stop it while you are using battery as a power source.
Turn Off background running and automatic updates of Apps
We download lots of apps daily from windows store but we never care of its background running. Background running of apps is a good feature but along with that it is a big battery eater. Turn off background running of unnecessary apps and also turn off automatic updates.
How to Turn off Automatic Updates of Apps in Windows 8 or 8.1 ?
- Press windows key + C and open settings.
- Goto App Updates and turn it off.
Change Battery of Laptop
If you think that your laptop battery is not performing well than you can change battery of your laptop. It will not cost you more than $100 bucks. New battery always performs well and It will give you battery backup of 8-9 hours.
Conclusion
These were few guidelines to increase battery life of windows 8 or windows 8.1 laptops. These all things may not give you major changes in battery life but it will surely increase your laptop’s battery by 1 to 2 hours. I hope this guidelines may help you. If you know any other tips which can play vital role in increasing battery life than feel free to share it with me in comments.
Brijesh Gohil is the founder of Tech Brij, A popular Tech Blog which is focused on Tech tips & Buying Guides. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter, Google + & LinkedIn.