Gunk Busters!

Power Tips: Optimize Your Notebook

Notebook garbage is like desktop garbage, only worse: All that excess activity saps your system's resources. Anything that unnecessarily drains your laptop's battery deserves to get dumped. A quick tune-up can make any notebook more energy efficient.

A Power Makeover

Choose the right power scheme for your work style (or make a scheme of your own). Click Start, Control Panel, Performance and Maintenance (if necessary), Power Options. Under Power Schemes, pick Max Battery, and click OK. This setting shuts off your monitor after 1 minute and puts your notebook in standby if you don't use it for 2 minutes. If that is too soon, repeat the steps and choose the Portable/Laptop power scheme, which goes into standby after 5 minutes. (Note that some battery-saving modes may slow your system down.)

Another way to reduce your notebook's power consumption is by dimming the screen. Unfortunately, every notebook manufacturer seems to have a different technique for screen dimming, so you may have to go digging for your owner's manual. (Some laptop keyboards have keys with light icons and up/down arrows.) My rule of thumb: Set your screen to the dimmest setting you can stand, and then bump it up one step. Ultimately you're better off draining a little more of the battery than straining your eyes.

A notebook's built-in wireless card sucks up power as it looks for access points, so disable yours when you're not working on a network. Other laptop power-grabbers that you should unplug when you don't need them are USB devices and PC Cards.

Clean Out the Background

Give autostart programs the heave-ho when you're running on battery power. In addition to following the steps in "Poke Autostart Porkers," right-click the icons in your system tray (near the clock) and shut down the programs you don't need. They'll start up again the next time Windows loads.

Standby or Hibernate?

Windows XP's standby mode stops your hard drive and monitor, but everything currently in your system's memory stays there, using a little trickle of power. Hibernation mode writes everything in memory to the hard drive and shuts down your machine completely. Windows springs back quickly from standby mode, but it takes much longer to wake up from hibernation. However, if your notebook's battery dies while in standby, you lose any changes to your open files that you haven't saved.

To put your notebook into standby mode, click Start, Turn Off Computer, Stand By. To make the unit hibernate, choose Start, Turn Off Computer and click Hibernate (you may have to hold down the <Shift> key to see this option). If it won't hibernate, click Start, Control Panel, Performance and Maintenance (if necessary), Power Options, Hibernate, and check Enable hibernation. To restart your system from either mode, press the power button.

If your computer has a "Sleep" button, or if it turns off when you close the lid, click the Advanced tab to find options for adjusting these settings in the Power Buttons box.

Woody Leonhard