Five Energy Saving Tips for Longer Laptop Runtime and Lower Electric Bills
No matter whether you want to help save the earth, get your laptop to run longer, or reduce the cost of your energy bill, ghacks has a handful of suggestions for making each kilowatt go a little further in your office.
Buy energy efficient products. This one should be common sense, but keep an eye out for the Energy Star logo when buying computer peripherals -- especially monitors.- Optimize your PC's power management scheme. In Windows Vista, open Power Options in the Control Panel and set the amount of time to wait before shutting down your hard drive and monitor. You should also put your computer to sleep overnight. See our recent Guy Vs. Guy on power management for some additional, somewhat heated, perspective.
- Turn down the brightness of your monitor. The display is the single biggest customer of your laptop's battery power -- lowering it will dramatically extend your runtime. Also, be sure to use Aerofoil if you have Windows Vista.
- Don't use a screensaver -- just turn the monitor off when you're not using it.
- Disable devices you don't need. Your laptop doesn't need to drive the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios all the time, does it? Shut them off to get more battery life.
