Increase Battery Life for Electronics

With more and more of our everyday electronics becoming wireless, that means more and more of them rely on a battery for power. It's simply to plug a phone in, but sometimes you aren't able to for long periods of time and need to make sure it's usable when you need it. Here are some tips on how to get more run-time out of your battery powered electronics.

Step 1 Understand what uses power

As with any electronic device, the amount of power a battery powered device uses depends on what it's doing. A boom box doesn't last as long when you have the volume turned up, and a laptop drains more power when you're burning a DVD. There are many things that you can be aware of that tend to be big drains on battery life, I'll list them then explain how their drain can be reduced, the four biggest battery busters are:

- Volume Level
- Active Wireless Communication
- Lighting
- Spinning disc drives

Comments

[Grey_Wolfe]

2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 11.... Yep, sounds legit to me.

[ReCreate]

woah i have 12 im safe whew!

[Derin]

Mine goes to 35.It probably goes higher than that,but I didn't test it.

[ReCreate]

What is it that we are talking about...O_o

[Solderguy]

I took the battery out of my computer and power it from the AC adapter. It saves power by not turning electrical energy to chemical energy and back to electrical energy.

[vengeful_lemon]

But this one goes to eleven!

[fordman15243]

why didn't you just make 10 louder...?

[carpespasm]

.... These go to eleven.

[bishopp14]

"But this one goes to eleven!" That's classic! lmao!

[dannygirsh]

that's one more.. isn't it?

[fordman15243]

The same principals with the microsoft zune, if you turn off the wireless, the battery life nearly doubles!

[alex-sharetskiy]

hey you got vista! i usually set the processor power to 75% and dim the screen to a minimum

[lukkbox]

my condolences on your OS brother ;)

[carpespasm]

Yeah, that was on my work computer. I might add a screen cap from a Mac and Ubuntu machine as well.

[dude111115]

thats an interesting thought ( and a great prank to my bro ) please tell me how to turn down a processor?

[carpespasm]

There's either a setting for the clock multiplier or front side bus speed in the computer's BIOS, or there are various programs depending on your processor to do that from within your OS. It's worth noting that messing with this can make the computer unresponsive or overheat it if you turn it up. It also doesn't make it act slower like a film played in slow motion, so it's not such a great prank.

[dude111115]

ok, PLESE GIVE ME A FRIKIN PROGRAM! IVE SEARCHED THE WHOLE INTERNET AND NO ONE HAS ONE! i cant get into my bios, i broke them trying to get through the pass my dad set( he dont remember it anymore and the jumper switch wont work )

[skylab]

uhm...yeah...if you want to turn all the fun stuff off, you can make the batteries last longer... And, turning the device all the way OFF will give you maximum battery life... I'm just being obtuse, here, in fun. The real answer is, as has been, better power technology. Ironically, it is small consumer devices like those you showcased that are driving better power research faster than any other industry sector.

[carpespasm]

Yep, turning off the fun stuff does detract from your total usefulness, but there are scenarios where it's useful. You don't need a cd going, your screen set to maximum brightness or bluetooth, or wifi sniffing around to get a paper written when you're stuck in a brownout the night before turning in a big report or some equally not likely but possible situation.