6 Trusted Ways To Extend You Laptop's Battery Life

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1. Activate battery saver mode
When you’re using your laptop on battery power, Windows shows your battery level in the taskbar. Click on the laptop battery level indicator and make sure any power-saving features are activated, PCMag recommends . While you may experience a noticeable performance loss, if you aren’t gaming, editing photos or videos, or completing tasks that require a lot of battery power, you won’t notice much of a difference.

2. Unplugged unused peripherals
PCMag also recommends you unplug any peripherals — say an external hard drive or webcam — while using battery power. In addition to transferring data between your device and your laptop, that cable is also drawing power to the peripheral itself even when you’re not using it. That’s an obvious drain on your laptop battery.

3. Plug it in before it dies
PC World notes that a lot of us like to wait until our laptops are all but dead before we plug it in , which is bad for your battery. If at all possible, never drain your laptop battery below a 20% charge. This extends the life of your battery as usage with a low charge puts a strain on the battery itself, and eventually reduces its charging capacity.

4. Keep your laptop out of hot and cold
Use your laptop in situations where the ambient temperature is neither hot nor cold, DigitalTrends recommends . Extreme temperatures cause your computer to work harder, which in turn drains the laptop battery faster. Too much exposure to these extremes can also damage the battery itself, shortening its useful life.

5. Have enough RAM
Computer manufacturer Dell has an interesting suggestion to extend your laptop battery life: Make sure it has enough RAM to do your tasks. If a computer can store information in your RAM rather than on the hard drive, it will. This is a faster way to retrieve data, and also keeps your hard drive from operating as much, which significantly drains your battery.

6. Don’t keep your laptop plugged in
Wired warns laptop users not to keep their laptops plugged in all the time . What they found is that laptops plugged in constantly actually have a lesser number of cycles (think of the battery drained, then plugged in to recharge — that’s a cycle) than those who kept their batteries between 20% and 80%.