Depending on your laptop’s model you can get anything from 1-hour usage to 12 hours, but there are things you can do to extend this even more by altering the settings on your laptop to make it more efficient.

To get started, find the battery icon on your Windows 7 laptop, it will be on the bottom taskbar near where the time is displayed. Click on this once as you would to check how much battery you have left. You’ll see a link called “more power options”, and you’ll open a control panel screen called power options, where you can change all sorts of settings. You’ll probably have been on this screen before to adjust how long your screen stays on when you leave it alone. This is basic power saving, but in this tutorial we’re going to be looking at more advanced options.

What you need to do is choose one of the existing power plans, and click on the link next to it that says “change plan settings”. This will take you to yet another screen where you can adjust sleep and display settings. Underneath all of this you’ll see another link called “change advance power settings”. Click on this to move onto the next step.

In the advanced power options you’ll find many different settings including video power settings, to hard disk settings, USB power settings, wireless adapter settings etc. You’ll find you can adjust all of these separately whether you’re running on power, or on battery, and this will enable you to fine tune your laptop for the tasks and environment you typically use it for.

To give an example, if you take your laptop to an office each day and plug it into the corporate network with a CAT5 cable, the chances are you don’t use Wi-Fi a great deal. If that’s the case, you can safely turn off power to your built in Wi-Fi adapter. This will save a small amount of power that could make the difference between working for 30 minutes or 35 minutes on the train-ride home.

Of course, we’re only really talking about squeezing the last few drops of power out of your battery with these settings. All the real savings are made by adjusting the basic settings to govern how long the hard-drive and screen stay on when you’re away from the laptop. However there are saving to be made here, especially with the hard disk, screen and Wi-Fi settings. These are typically some of the most power intensive devices in your laptop, so making savings where can here should increase the life of your battery. Once you’ve finished and you’re happy with the changes you’ve made, click okay to save your settings and close the screens. You may find you need to restart your computer before some of your new settings take effect.

You might want to check you’re laptop’s documentation, or check with the manufacturer to see how often you should do this. Sometimes they will say it’s not necessary, and sometimes they will say once a month, or once or twice a year. The response often depends on whom you speak to at the company and there isn’t a defined best practice. However, you can’t do any harm by performing a manual recalibration, so why not give it a go and see if it makes a difference?

Recalibration involves charging your battery to 100%, and then discharging it completely to 0%. Once that’s done you charge it back to 100% to complete the calibration.

The way to do this is easy. Begin by creating yourself a custom power plan in your windows power settings. You’ll find the power options in your control panel, and once you’re in the power options screen, click on “create a power plan”.

On the next screen you’ll want to choose “high performance” and give your new power plan a name. For the purposes of this exercise, let’s call it “calibration”. Click next, and you’ll get the opportunity to choose the settings for your new power plan. Make sure you change all the dropdown lists to “never”, so that your laptop doesn’t power anything down. Now make sure that your calibration power plan is selected and in use. You can find out by hovering your mouse over the battery icon in the taskbar of your computer.

Okay, now we’ve done this, the first step of the actual calibration is to charge your battery to full power. So plug your laptop into the mains and wait until the battery power meter reads 100%. If you hover your mouse over the power meter icon, it should read “fully charged”.

The second step is now to remove the power cord from your laptop and making sure your power plan is set to the calibration plan we created earlier, wait until the battery power reaches 0%. When your laptop reaches this, of course it will shutdown. Be sure that you aren’t running any software when you do this, otherwise you could potentially lose some work, although usually laptops will automatically save it’s current state before shutting itself off.

Finally, the last step is to completely recharge you laptop again back to 100%. So plug in your AC adapter, turn on your laptop and wait until the battery is fully charged again to 100%. Don’t turn off your computer while this is taking place to make sure you get a full charge. You should now have a recalibrated battery that will hopefully last a little longer.

BatteryInfoView is a portable Nirsoft application that provides in depth information about a device’s battery. The program displays information like the battery name, manufacturer, manfuacturing date or serial on startup. This, and more than a dozen battery related information, from the battery’s power state over current capacity, full charged capacity, voltage or the number of charge and discharge cycles.

The estimated remaining battery time for the current activity, and the full battery time for the current activity are also displayed directly on screen.

Those information can be very helpful. The battery name and manufacturer can be helpful to order a new battery for instance.

BatteryInfoView comes with a second mode, which you can activate by pressing F8. The battery log keeps track of a battery status over time. It is set by default to record the status every 30 seconds. Users who prefer a different interval can press F9 to open the advanced options to change the interval.

A log, which acts as a battery monitor at the same time, can be pretty handy to analyze the discharge speed of the built-in battery. A new log entry is added whenever the computer changes state, for instance if it is put into standby or hibernate and resumed at a later time. This way it is relatively easy to calculate the discharge rate when in one of those modes. You can switch back to the default battery information mode with F7.

The program comes with the usual Nirsoft options to export the information into xml, html or csv files. The easiest way to do that is to press Ctrl-S, or by using the File menu.

BatteryInfoView is a handy portable software for mobile Windows devices. The program is compatible with all 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system, from Windows 2000 up to Windows 7. Program downloads are provided directly on the Nirsoft website.

A left-click on the icon will display all power plans that have been configured in the operating system. This makes those power plans more accessible as Windows 7 by default only displays a link to the power plans in the system tray if the computer runs on battery (which means there is no direct option to switch power plans).

The very same menu contains an option to power off the display of the computer to save additional power. This can save a minute or even more of the power needed to power the display depending on the configuration of the active power saving plan as Windows 7 does not offer the option to dim the display instantly.

A right-click on the icon opens configuration options. The menu contains a link to the Windows Control Panel where power plans can be configured and new power plans added. These new power plans appear then during a left-click as well.

The user of the computer can configure the program to switch to a power plan when a power source is plugged in and out and to activate power saving mode at a specific power level. It is a bit unfortunate that the custom power plans are not available in the selection. That’s something that the developer might consider adding to a later version of the laptop power plan assistant.

Power Plan Assistant is compatible with Microsoft’s operating system Windows 7. The software can be downloaded from the developer’s website. Other applications that offer a similar functionality are Battery Care, the laptop battery monitor Battcursor or Powertop for Linux.

The web browsers of the test were: Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.5.2 with and without adblock add-on, Google Chrome 2, Opera 9.64, 10.0b3 and Safari 4. Three laptops were used in the test. Two entry level Gateway laptops with AMD and Intel cpus and the ASUS Eee PC 1005HA netbook.

Gateway NV52

Gateway NV58

Asus EEE PC 1005HA

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 is the web browser that drains the least amount of battery on the two entry level laptops. Most other web browsers with the exception of Safari come close to that results, especially Firefox with the adblock add-on. The benefit of the adblock add-on suggests that web advertisement does have an impact on battery usage. Safari 4 is the only web browser in the test that performed worst in all three tests.

Google Chrome 2 was first in the netbook test with all other web browsers close by except for Safari which completely drained the battery of the netbook more than two hours earlier than the other web browsers.

Even if the test needs to be replicated with a larger website sample size it seems to indicate that laptop users are better off without the Safari web browser. Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla Firefox with adblock and Google Chrome were the best performing web browsers in the test.

BattCursor adds another battery monitoring possibility for computer systems running the Windows Vista operating system. The free software program displays the remaining battery power next to the mouse cursor so that it is always in sight.

The colors of the mouse cursor change at thresholds to inform the user about the battery status. A red cursor for instance indicates a low battery while a green cursor indicates that lots of battery power is remaining.

Battcursor requires the Microsoft Windows operating system and the .net Framework 2.0 or higher. It comes with a few additional settings that can extend the battery life of the laptop further. This includes dimming the computer display or turning of Aero.

One of the bet ways to save battery is by reducing the power of several core components such as the processor or graphic adapters.

Notebook Hardware Control is a free software program that has been designed to take care of the needs of notebook users. Power management is however only one – very extensive – option of the software.

The software comes preinstalled with several hardware profiles like max. battery, dynamic switching or battery optimized. These profiles can be easily set by right-clicking the icon in the System Tray.

The maximum battery setting can for example be used to use the notebook for as long as possible while dynamic switching ensures that battery life will be saved as long as the system does not need additional power.

It is also possible to customize those settings further by defining multipliers and voltage settings manually.

Next to that are similar options for the video card and hard disk. The hard disk settings go further by providing access to advanced power management and acoustic management settings. An Advanced Configuration and Power Interface system can be enabled as well.

Notebook Hardware Control is a software program that is compatible with 32-bit editions of Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista. It requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 or higher.

Battery Run is a little command line utility that checks if a power cable is connected. Once it gets disconnected it starts a user defined action and another one when the cable gets connected again. You could for instance play a sound if the power cable gets disconnected to notify you or a software that would reduce power consumption.

Usage is straightforward. Download and unpack the file on your hard drive. Use the command batteryrun load-program-when-disconnected load-program-when connected. For example: batteryrun disconnected.wav connected.wav

Batteryrun will play the disconnected.wav file when the power cable gets disconnected and the connected.wav file when it gets connected again. A icon should appear in the system tray if everything was setup correctly.

Just download and unzip Battery Eater Pro to your hard drive. A great thing about the software is that it does not need installation, so no tampering with your system at all. Once you started Battery Eater Pro it will wait until the battery is fully loaded. Once this is done you can start the test by pressing SHIFT + F3. (disconnect the power plug before you do that)

The test will run until the notebook runs out of power and powers off. Connect the notebook to a power source and Battery Eater Pro will load automatically at startup and display test results. The test results will show accurate information which might differ from the figures of the manufacturer.