Lindsay Smith: Did you know that over 50% of Canadians actually own laptops and about another 10% are planning to get laptops within the next two years by 2010. Well, most of those people probably aren't planning to get an extra battery for their laptop when they are away from a power supply. So today, we are going to look at a few quick tips in order to help you save on your laptop battery in case you don't want to have to lag around an extra one. Let's start off by taking a look at setting up your power control settings on your laptop to be a little bit more conservative. All you have to do is basically go into the control panel here. Right now, I am on an HP computer running Windows Vista, so it will look different depending on the type of computer that you have, but just remember to go into the main control panel and look for the system in maintenance section. Within there, you're going to find an area, where you can actually change and adjust your power settings.
In Vista here, it's under power options. So under the power saver window here, you can see that there is a couple of different options. One, you can save your settings for when you are running on battery power and the other for when you are plugged in. Now obviously, when you are plugged into the wall, you don't really have to worry as much about how much you're draining. So, say for example, when we're looking at when you want to turn off your display, here I've got it set for after 20 minutes. So we're still being conscious about the environment and not draining unnecessary power but you know I'm not going to worry too much if it's on for 20 minutes.
On the other side of it, when I'm draining my battery power, you want to keep it down to about three minutes or less. So, I just go in here, you see I've got the option 1, 2, 3 minutes, whatever you are comfortable with and that's going to save more power than when you are plugged in. The other thing you can do is put your computer into sleep. So, here I've got it set on battery for 15 minutes for it to go into sleep when I am running off battery power or an hour if I am plugged in. Also, I want to show you the advanced power settings on here. It gets a little bit more technical here, but as you can see, there is a variety of different options here that it'll walk you through in order to save on the resources.
The other little tip I want to give you is that your screen actually uses up about 10 watts of power if it's an LCD screen, so you'll see here on the laptop keyboard, you can actually adjust the brightness if you look at the shortcut function keys at the top here. On this particular HP, it's actually F7 which lowers -- dims the brightness. On most laptops, you'll find it's probably F6 and if you are using a MacBook, it's typically F1, but the nice thing to do is when you run the road and you are running off your battery, dim it down to as low as you can take it without hurting your eyes or making them strain too much and that's going to save you a little bit of power.
The last thing to keep in mind is don't run multiple programs at a time. If you are anything like me, I've often got the Internet going, I've got my email on, I've got creative programs running and the list goes on. Sometimes, I got up to ten windows on there. Well, if you are running off your battery, you probably only want to limit that to about one or two at a time and that's going save you in a long run. Also, if you listen to DVDs and CDs on the road music, movies things like that, you probably want to copy the data onto your hard drive first, that's going to take up very less power and resources than if you are actually running the CD or the DVD player within the actual laptop. So, next time you are on the road and you don't want to have to carry around an extra battery and you're going to be away from a power supply, keep in mind these tips and you're going to make your laptop last you a little bit longer.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services