How to Optimize Laptop Battery Life

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Dave Andrews, today I'm going to show you how to optimize battery life on a laptop. Let's go to our computer, and we're going to change the power options on this laptop to optimize our battery's life. Let's click on the start button, and we're going to run the control panel, so right above it click on control panel. Or actually type control panel. And then the list of programs that it returns, let's click on control panel. Now make sure that your control panel has the classic view selected simply by clicking on it if it hasn't already. And we're going to find power options, which is right here. It's got the little battery with the plug wrapping around it. Just double click on that. Over here on the right is where you get to set all the cool options that determine how your computer uses it's battery. Now the best thing to do is to choose when to turn off the display, because turning off your laptops display is one of the best ways to conserve battery power. So I'm going to click on that, and as you can see when it says on battery, it will turn off my display after five minutes of not using the laptop. And it will actually put the computer to sleep after ten minutes of not using the laptop. So I can also drag this little slider bar here, and it's going to adjust how bright my display is. Once you have this set to something that you think is good I'd suggest you go with maybe five minutes for turning off the display. Maybe even less. Putting the computer to sleep ten minutes is a little quick, so you might want to go with twenty minutes. Just click save those changes, and that has saved my power preferences. Now you can also, some laptops come with power plans, and you can click on the power saver option. And if I click on change the plan settings that actually pulls up the settings that were set for this particular power option. As you can see this one is going to turn off the display after three minutes, and it's going to put the computer to sleep after fifteen minutes. So just play with these settings an little bit, and come up with the one that best suits your use as well as maximizes your battery usage. My name is Dave Andrews, and I've just showed you how to optimize your battery life on a laptop."