Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon minuman from TechnoBuffalo and in this video we're going to show you how to get better battery life on your netbook these tips will also apply to your laptop if you have one but netbooks notoriously have smaller batteries so battery management power management becomes more important now these tips are for Windows 7 and Windows Vista and some of them will work on Windows XP if you're using Windows XP most of the utilities that we're going to use to adjust power management can be found in the control panel so let's start off by going to the start menu and I want to get into advanced system settings so I'm just going to type system settings and here we are right here and underperformance I'm going to click settings now to get better battery life you want to uncheck as many as these items as you can possibly stand because a lot of them like the fancy animations and the arrow glass effect utilize the GPU and the CPU which uses electricity so if you can disable as many as possible you'll get a small incremental gain and battery life because your your computer doesn't have to work as hard to produce these visual effects so that's step one step two is that we want to go into power options so click on start or go into control panel and go into power options and we have a lot of tools to work with in here so here we are in the power options screen and we want to click Change plan settings and from here we can adjust some sort of basic power plant options we can choose to dim the display and obviously you want to have this set as low as possible this will dim the display when you're not using your computer to about fifty percent its brightness as it is set when you're using it also you want to set turn off the display as low as you possibly can stand so that's not inconvenient for you and also you want to put the computer to sleep the default is about 15 minutes but it's likely that you're not going to be not using your netbook for 15 minutes you'll probably close the lid anyhow so that number does it matter as much and of course you want to adjust screen brightness as low as you possibly can stand because the backlight uses a tremendous amount of power from your device now we want to go down to change advanced power set we're going to go through a few things in here the first thing that we're going to go to is hard disk make sure that your computer is set to turn off the hard disk while it's on battery after a certain amount of time five or ten minutes makes a lot of sense if you're using a solid-state drive this doesn't matter as much if you're using a mechanical hot hard drive you will see gains if the hard drive is shutting off after five minutes of inactivity because it does use a significant amount of electricity okay going down the list wireless adapter settings you're rather actually has to support this in order for it to work what it does is your router will actually buffer packets and wait kind of microseconds to send the information to your netbook or laptop and your netbook current laptop will turn off the wireless radio temporarily saving a little bit of battery life you can adjust this to maximum power savings but this will actually decrease the performance of your Wi-Fi just a little bit so probably the best bet is to leave it on medium power saving unless you're trying to squeeze out every last drop of power and battery life from your netbook let's move on let's go to sleep make sure you have hybrid sleep enabled what this does is it transitions your your netbook or laptop from sleep to hibernate after a certain period of time sleep is a low-power state that does use electricity the good thing about sleep is that your computer will go on within about one or two seconds the downside is that it does use your battery life while you're not using your computer hibernate is a much better option because it uses pretty much no power just to illuminate you know the LED but it takes longer to get your computer on so what you're going to want your computer to do is go from sleep to hibernate after about four or five hours that way you can still have the convenience of using sleep but if you're going to bed for the night or you're going away for the day your computer will slip out of sleep and go into hibernate so it's not using a lot of power while you're your way or you're sleeping so make sure that's enabled and then we want to go to this setting hibernate after and I have it set at 160 minutes so after four hours it will go from sleep to hibernate that seems to be a good amount of time and finally we want to go down here to where it says battery your computer will actually shut off after it gets to a certain critical battery level and you can reduce this critical battery level so he squeeze every last minute of work time out of your net book or laptop so we're going to click on critical battery action and on battery it will hibernate after we get to a certain percentage of battery and that's good that's what we wanted to do and then we want to go down the critical battery level and the lowest you can possibly go is two percent so when the computer gets down the two percent it will slip into hibernate but of course they'll give you a warning at ten percent and and five percent or as specified by the low battery notification so that you have some morning and you know to save your documents before the device slips into hibernate mode so that was a look on how to get better battery life on your laptop and netbook I figure that you'll get an increase about ten to twenty percent in battery life if you implement some of these changes and of course if you bring the screen brightness down a little lower and you have the display dim even more these things all add up to better battery life so that's it for now