Looking to improve your laptop’s battery life? Upgrading hardware is much better than tweaking software to improve energy efficiency. Unfortunately, not all mobile computers offer easy component upgrades. However, most full-size laptops can be upgraded, a process that takes surprisingly little time or effort. Ultrabooks, on the other hand, require a bit more elbow grease to upgrade.
Four components are relatively easy to upgrade:
- HDD
- WiFi map
- Bluetooth module
- Battery upgrade
I also illustrate where these parts lie in the HP Pavilion 17. The upgrade process usually involves just a few screws and one removable panel for a full-size laptop. Smaller laptops, such as ultrabooks (what is an ultrabook?), may require considerably more effort.
Endlessly reworded software packages
I won’t cover Linux optimizations and/or Windows tooling as they get a lot of coverage. In 2009, Saikat published an up-to-date article on 21 laptop battery life improvements. Most relevant: Decreasing screen brightness and optimizing your laptop’s operating system for power consumption. For Windows 8 Tablets Windows 8 Tablets the process is pretty similar.
Easy hardware upgrade
Solid State Drives
Common myth : all solid state drives ( what is a solid state drive? ) consumes less, than traditional disk-based hard drives. Truth : Some SSDs consume very little, and some spend huge amounts. The same applies to conventional hard drives. On average, SSDs consume less than hard drives. But the number of SSDs will drain substantially more.
Installing a new SSD on most full-sized laptops will require removing the back case cover and disconnecting the hard drive from the SATA connector. It takes me about 5 minutes (actually less) to change the drive. You will also need to either clone the operating system. or reinstall it.
Anandtech has reduced the power consumption of modern SSDs. They found that Samsung drives typically use less power than OCZ drives, for example. Hard drives consume power in (mostly) two ways — idle or active. Active consumption tends to be higher for spinning HDDs (because they have to literally spin the drive) than for SSDs. On the other hand, solid state drives may suffer from higher idle (and sometimes active) power consumption as it contains the equivalent of a miniature computer (which includes RAM, multi-core processors, and more).
Such hardware requires significant overhead, although that is why SSDs jump ahead of hard drives. Solid state drives tend to live in extreme power consumption conditions. Some of them can burn up to 5 watts per hour when active. Others consume around 1 (or less).
For power consumption, I recommend any Samsung 840 or 850 drive. In theory, the 850 series, which uses a smaller nanometer manufacturing process along with «3D» stacked memory cells, should offer some of the highest power consumption figures. Early reports confirm this, as Anandtech rates the 850 as the third most energy efficient drive.
For more information, see our solid state guide.
Wireless-AC and Bluetooth 4.0
Fortunately, most modern laptops use a mini-PCI-express (or mPCIe) module for WiFi and Bluetooth access. Most budget mobile computers use older mini-PCIe cards that combine Bluetooth 3 and 802.11n wireless. They consume significantly more than the latest Bluetooth 4 and 802.11ac standards. Both standards require compatible peripherals to obtain power savings.
