If you are not satisfied with the default power options of your computer, this article will provide you with helpful recommendations allowing you to configure the settings according your preferences. This is crucial for desktop computers if you would like to minimise the power consumption and its especially helpful for maintaining the longevity of the performance of your laptop.
Energy Options
You are able to configure the power options using system setup utility or from the operating system level. OS settings will override the CMOS settings. Generally, some settings apply the same way but the implementation may differ. For instance, enabling and disabling power management, configure which devices are able to wake the devices, configure what the power button operate, what should the system do when restored from a power outage and so on.
Operating system uses terms like Energy Options or Power Options. You might come into more technical terms inside the system configuration utility. In case you are having hard times finding them under the obvious name. They might name it like Advanced Power Management (APM ) or Advanced Configuration and power interface (ACPI). These term more common in Intel based specifications.
Power usage configurations
Many of the CMOS version’s settings determine wake-up events, such as help system to monitor a modem or NIC. This is commonly known as Wake on LAN. Inside Windows operating system, APM/ACPI settings are found in the Power & Sleep and go to the settings app in Windows 10 and Control Panel applet Power Options. In newer Windows simply type power and settings.
Windows system provides Power Plans, which enable better control over the power usage by customising a balanced, high performance or power saver plan. Although this are widely available on all laptops, some laptops will restrict you to the default balanced plan, like Microsoft’s Surface Pro.
The kind of customisation you can do is, for instance, configure to turn off display after a certain time is passed, what it does when it is plugged in or on battery and so on. For specific power plans, look and click for Additional Power Settings or you can go directly to the Control panel Power Options applet. You can tweak a lot of stuff there.
Manually Control Power usage
Almost every laptop now gives you the ability to reduce battery usage under certain circumstances. You can do it with on/ off switch on the laptop or bunch of keyboard combinations, which disables Wi-Fi antenna or shut down Bluetooth etc. Many of these are mostly replaced by the smartphone feature like aeroplane mode, which disables most or all of the wireless components right away. Aeroplane mode is also great for shutting down power hungry components right away.
Laptops that have backlit keyboards have some ways of disabling this feature when not needed, which is usually done by some sort of keyboard combination. You are able to reduce the LCD backlight. This is done by the fn key and screen adjustment keys found somewhere among the keys. This can give you some extra time to work on your stuff without losing the battery so soon.
One of the best way to preserve the battery is having a plan ahead of time when the laptop will be performing unplugged. This includes a little arrangement you need to make beforehand. Such as to minimize number of programs that will be used, hardware devices you will use etc. For instance, getting the necessary files stored in the hard drive of the laptop without the need of USB flash drive or Wi-Fi, both of these consumes electricity.