When I bought my first laptop (Dell Latitude), I did not really look at the battery capacity. The computer was nice but it used to run out of battery charge every 3 hours. I was constantly charging it and often just left the AC adapter plugged in to avoid the annoyance of charging the battery. Later when I bought laptops, I always looked for a long lasting battery (at least 6 cells) so that I can keep using the laptop for 5-6 hours uninterrupted.
There are some other factors that can also affect the battery life, such as the CPU (in general, Intel processors use less power for the same processing power compared to other CPUs), storage type (HDD uses more power compared to SSD) and the GPU configuration (you can reduce graphics performance to reduce power consumption) and more.
If you have a notebook computer that uses Intel HD Graphics processor then you are in luck – you can make its battery last longer just by changing one setting for the graphics card. Here is how:
- Right-click anywhere on the Windows desktop screen and select Graphics Properties from the context-menu. Alternatively, you can also click on the Intel HD Graphics icon in the system tray and select Graphics Properties from there.
- From the Intel HD Graphics Control Panel, select Power.
- From the left side select On Battery.
- From a list of power plans, select Maximum Battery Life.
- For the Power Saving Technology select Maximum Battery.
- Finally click on Apply to save the settings.
This is it, you have change the GPU settings to reduce the graphics card performance in order to maximize the battery life. For ordinary computer use (text editors, web browsers, listening to music etc), you won’t notice any difference. But when higher GPU performance is needed like games, videos etc, then you will see that quality of graphics output has gone down. But this one setting can make your laptop battery last for extra 2 hours.
In my laptop it gives a little more backup but backup is not increased for 2 hours
It depends on the battery capacity too.