Batteries: those things you never think about until they’re about to run out. Fortunately there are a number of ways to get your smartphone and laptop to last for longer before running out of battery life.
Smartphone Battery Tips
These days one of the biggest issues with smartphones is how long the battery lasts, especially considering how often we use them. This is true in terms of how often you have to charge it, but also in terms of how long it lasts until it can barely hold a charge and needs to be replaced.
Before you can know how to save battery life on your smartphone figure out what’s currently draining it. Go to the phone settings, select battery and look at the biggest power usages on your phone. Consider deleting some of these apps and make sure they are all updated. In addition, turn on the battery saver mode.¹
Maps, Games, Photos, GPS Apps
The biggest battery drainers are generally games, maps, and apps that use GPS like Uber or iFood. In addition taking lots of photos – especially with flash – eats up your battery like pac man. Apps like Skype are also major energy drainers, so try to sign out and close them when you don’t need to use them or have them active for an incoming call.
Make sure apps aren’t running in the background that you don’t need: these are basically just a constant drain on your battery.
Battery Saving Tactics
Now that battery saver mode is on and some energy draining apps are uninstalled or closed, you can go about saving more of your battery. For one thing, turn your screen brightness down to a slightly lower level. Often it is higher than you need and eats up your battery.
Secondly, you can disable sound and have vibrate only or even turn off vibration if you aren’t expecting important calls. You can always manually look at your phone every hour or two to see if you have missed important calls or messages.²
More Battery Saving Tips
Under permissions in app settings there should be an option to choose which apps run at startup or not. Use this to deselect apps from auto-starting which you rarely use. This will also have the added benefit of speeding the boot up time for your smartphone. Other good ideas are to enable dark mode, which uses less battery power, and to decrease the sleep time so that your screen doesn’t stay on for a long time before going off. Turning down your volume also doesn’t have a huge effect, but it can save battery power over time to have a lower volume.¹
Laptop Battery Tips
Laptop batteries are another item that often seem to run out quickly and even have to be replaced over time. Thankfully there are several steps you can take to make your battery last longer.
One of the simplest ways to save your laptop battery on a PC is to use the Windows Battery Performance Slider that basically does an up-front analysis of what’s using most of your battery and lets you adjust it to a setting you prefer such as Best Performance, Better Battery and Battery Saver Mode.
In addition, turning down your screen brightness and volume, reducing the number of apps and programs you have running at one time and turning off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth can end up saving a lot of energy drain. By going to tools and looking at your apps you can also uninstall apps you rarely use and prevent others from booting up at startup. In addition, opening task manager (or activity monitor on a Mac) will allow you to manually close apps that are using up a lot of CPU power.
Doing a thorough virus scan and getting rid of any infections or malware is also highly recommended and will help battery health.³
[1] https://www.techadvisor.co.uk/how-to/mobile-phone/extend-phone-battery-3284240/
[2] https://www.lovefone.co.uk/blogs/news/10-ways-to-make-your-phone-battery-last-longer
[3] https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-increase-your-laptop-battery-life