On a new laptop everything works fine. Windows boots quickly, every application responds in a flash, and battery life is at its peak. As time went on and laptops filled with crapware, things started to change for the worse.
The boot time you used to brag about becomes annoying, and the battery starts to drain faster than before, too. We have discussed how you can fix slow windows startup to speed up your work and today I will show you how you can increase battery life.
No, I won’t ask you to switch to power saving mode or adjust the screen brightness, but we will see how you can use the Windows Power Diagnostic tool and look at the general issues affecting to the battery life of your laptop and what can be done with it.
Create and view reports
Step 1: To generate the report, you will have to run Command Prompt as Administrator. On your Start Menu, search for CMD, right click cmd.exe and select Run as administrator. You may need to grant UAC permission to the process.
Step 2: On the command prompt type powercfg –energy and press enter. Windows will then start diagnosing, which will take about a minute to complete. Once done, the command prompt returns the number of errors, warnings, and other information it logged. All of this information will be saved as a report file in HTML format.
Step 3: Now type energy-report.html and press enter to see the report in your default browser.
Note: You may sometimes get a “This site not found” error on your browser when viewing the report. Copy the energy-report.html file from the C:/Windows/system32/ folder to any other folder and then open it manually in the browser.
Understand the report
The report is divided into four parts. The first is the header and contains basic system information of your computer. The second, third, and final sections are errors, warnings, and information, respectively. Errors are highlighted in red, warnings are in light yellow, while information is in plain text.
So let’s see how we can use this information effectively to fix battery life.
Error part
This section will highlight all the points regarding your peripherals and other services responsible for draining your battery. For example, see this warning.
Accordingly, I disabled the default sleep time of my computer when it was running on battery power, and to achieve optimal battery performance, I had to fix this problem.
Cool Tip: If you’re not sure how to edit Windows power packs, you can check out our detailed guide to Power Options in Windows. Although the article was written for Windows Vista, it also applies to Windows 7.
Warning section
The warning section will give you information that won’t directly affect your battery life, but if you work with them, it will increase performance. For example, the warning above shows me that the default hard drive timeout is long and can be fixed to further increase performance.
Information section
This section contains information regarding the optimization process that Windows follows when your laptop runs on battery power and is for a need-to-know facility only.
Conclusion
So use the diagnostic report to increase your laptop’s battery life by fixing problems you never knew existed. And this is not a one-time process. I recommend running this diagnostic report once a month or when you perform scheduled maintenance on your computer.
Top image credits: saschaaa
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
