At normal usage, a laptop battery lasts about 1,000 charge cycles or usually 2 to 4 years. (A charge cycle is the full charging and draining up of the battery). Your battery will not be able to deliver the backup time like a new battery.
Now you will have to buy a new battery for your laptop or if you want to use your laptop plugged in almost all the time, there’s no need to replace the laptop battery. If you want your laptop to give more backup than it does and also increase your battery’s overall lifespan then you can do that by following these methods-
Turn down display brightness
Yes, the brightness of your device matters as when your laptop brightness is full, all the pixels in the display are powered fully. So if you use device with full brightness, you should lower the brightness; It’ll be good for your eyes too.
You can do that by function keys mapped to display brightness or you can find the brightness slider by going to Settings > System > Display.
Paint it black
Another thing that drains the battery more is a bright desktop background as it requires the pixels to light up more bright which requires more power. To reduce that, try changing your desktop background to a dard picture of color by going to Settings > Personalization > Background.
Turn off keyboard backlights
Same as the display, the keyboard backlights also consume power. So when you don’t need keyboard backlight, you can turn your keyboard backlights off.
There is a function key bound to keyboard backlights to turn them on and off. If not, you’ll find a control for it in the display settings.
Check power and sleep settings
To save battery, your pc has built-in settings to turn off the screen when it’s not in use.
Access your “Power & sleep settings” from the taskbar (or by going to Settings > System > Power & sleep), and adjust the time before the display turns off automatically or puts your pc to sleep mode when it’s not in use and is running on battery power. The shorter you set these times, longer will your battery last.
Use Battery Saver
If you’re using Windows 10 or Windows 11, your windows have a built-in Battery Saver mode. When your remaining battery level goes below a certain amount which you can set yourself, the battery saver gets turned on.
The battery saver mode disables email and calendar syncing, push notifications, and apps that are running in the background. You can change battery saver settings by going to System label in settings and then to Battery.
Check Battery usage by app
Sometimes, applications on your pc consume battery resources in the background. You can check that by Settings > System > Battery and click Battery usage by app. The battery usage list will list all the applications and their percentage of battery drainage in the past 6 hours, 24 hours or a week.
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi
Bluetooth and Wifi are wireless networking technologies that consume more battery power. So you should turn them on only when you need otherwise turn them off. You can disable Wi-Fi by clicking the Wi-Fi button on the taskbar utility menu.
To disable Bluetooth you can go to Settings > Devices > Bluetooth & other devices and toggle off the switch for Bluetooth or by taskbar utility menu in Windows 11.
You can use Airplane mode to disable both.
Sync email less
Your pc’s mailing system sync’s mails very often which consume power. So, set Windows to check mails less frequently to extend the life of your battery. You can do this by going to Settings > Accounts > Email & app accounts.
Go to account > click on manage > Toggle the “download new content”
And set it to sync every 30 minutes, 60 minutes or manually and then click Done.
Heating issues
Heat is the enemy of your device and it’s battery. It will not only lessen the battery backup but also lower down the battery lifespan. So, do not ever let your laptop heat up to this extent that it needs a thermal shutdown.
If your laptop continuously rises to very high temperatures, it’s not good for battery. So, keep your laptop as cool as possible. Don’t restrict the air flow or consider using a cooling pad.
Avoid full discharges
Yes , It matters a lot. Most of the people do not even know about it or even if they know they forget it. As you know Laptop’s batteries have a finite number of charge cycles and would degrade over time if you regularly charge and discharge the laptop. People tend to fully discharge their batteries a lot.
Update your Windows
Windows Updates can be annoying but updating your windows is a good way of improving the programs that consume more power than they should. Sometimes a bug fix may help your operating system and apps use less battery power.
Adjust graphics settings
Laptop’s do have powerful dedicated graphics cards that consume battery power. So the dedicated graphics card should only be used for games and photo or video editing apps, and everything else should run by the integrated chip. For Mac laptops, Go to energy saver settings and check the Automatic graphics switching option.and in Windows go to the graphics card control panel. In case of Nvidia graphics you can right click on desktop and go to Nvidia control panel and In left menu select manage 3d settings, and choose graphics to be set to integrated, dedicated or automatic selection.