Why is my laptop battery draining so fast?: [Reasons and Their Solutions]
Laptops are a great way to stay connected and productive on the go. But they can be tricky because you need the power to keep them running. One of the most common complaints about laptops is that their battery life is not long enough.
Having high brightness, a lot of background programs, poor charging practices, location services, and of course, overheating are common culprits for battery drain in laptops. A faulty battery could also be an issue.
In this post, we will explore what factors contribute to the rapid discharge of your laptop’s battery and how you can prolong its life with certain precautions!
Laptop Battery Draining So Fast: 10 Reasons And Their Solutions
Usually, a laptop battery lasts for 3-4 hours. Due to wear and tear, that threshold would eventually lower. But if you see your battery lower abnormally, that means something is wrong.
For those of you looking for a solution to your laptop battery draining problems, we have compiled a list of problems and their solutions that will help you out. We hope this information is helpful and makes your life easier!
Let’s have a look.
1. Brightness of your laptop
When using a laptop, one should be careful about the brightness of the screen, because It will consume more battery compared to normal mode, also it’s hurtful for the eyes if you don’t have any kind of anti-blue light arrangements.
To extend the life of the battery, it is important to drop the brightness of the screen before using battery power. Because your laptop’s display is the major player behind battery consumption. A bright display uses more pixels than a dark one.
Especially we have a bad practice of using high brightness in a properly lit room. Lowering the brightness won’t even do a little change in your comfort level.
Moreover, using a laptop with a low brightness will reduce the number of charging required for battery replacement. This is extremely beneficial for your battery as it will be going through fewer loads.
Currently, most laptops have increased and decreased options to control the brightness. Using those buttons you can adjust a low level but ample amount of brightness for your eyes.
Also, you can adjust the brightness of the laptop by following this route:
Settings > System > Display.
2. Keyboard backlight
By turning off your laptop keyboard backlight, you can slow your battery draining percentage. The percentage will still decrease, but much slower at just 3-5% per hour.
This is because the backlight in laptops consumes power even when you are not using your laptop. Leaving your laptop open on a table with the backlight turned on will drain almost 1% of the battery every 10 minutes or more than that. This is why turning the backlight off is a good idea.
Some newer laptops can detect when they are being used on a lap and automatically shut the keyboard light off, this trick will probably not work on these models.
To Turn your backlight off press FN + Left or Right Arrow Key. This combo will turn the light on, and Off in case it was on already. The down arrow key will dim the keyboard lighting which is useful when using this laptop at night to lower the brightness of the screen.
Another way to turn off the keyboard backlight is to go to the ‘’ Control Center ‘’ and select ‘’ Mouse and Keyboard ‘’ options. Here you will see the disable option in the keyboard backlight option.
3. Improper charging of the battery
One thing you need to remember is that your laptop batteries are mostly lithium-ion batteries. Which can remember the highest charge level. In the past, we’d discharge the battery until it’s fully or close to being dead before we’d charge it up.
But that’s not a thing anymore. Now, you don’t have to fully discharge your laptop’s battery to die fully to restart it. You can charge it and pull out the plug anytime you choose to.
Rather, this practice will badly damage your battery and decrease the life of the battery lifetime.
An excellent way to save your battery health is to let the battery charge go low to a certain extent and after that charge it fully in one session. It would assist to calibrate your battery gauge. Once your laptop is almost full you can unplug it.
A standard range of this is to recharge the laptop when it shows around 20-30%. And remove the charging adapter when it is around 100%.
However, I’d say if you can help it, don’t unplug it when it’s fully charged, rather keep using it as it is. Because almost all the laptops made today have the ability to switch between AC/DC according to the situation. When the battery is full, the laptop would automatically switch to AC current, which is more efficient than DC, so you’re not losing out on anything.
4. Running unnecessary programs
To make your laptop last longer on a single charge, you need to close all of the unnecessary programs running. This will help conserve energy and keep your battery from draining.
Most of the time, when you are on your laptop, multiple things are running at once. Like having multiple browser tabs open in the background, your media players, even the much popular discord app is quite heavy now.
All these tasks require some sort of power to run properly. So that means that it will drain your battery faster than normal. That is why it is a good idea to close out any unnecessary programs that you aren’t using.
On the bottom-left corner of your screen you will see the ‘’ Search ‘’Type “Task Manager”, then hit enter or click on Task Manager in the pop-up window that appears.
On the Task Manager window, click on “More details” at the bottom of the screen. Click on “Processes” from the list on the left side of your screen. Then, select a program from this list and click it once to highlight it with a bolded border.
By pressing Ctrl + Alt + Delete – it opens up the task manager on your screen and closes down any programs that are currently running. If you click on “More Details” and then click on “Applications”, it will help give you more information about the software and provide an easy way to close out of them as well, if needed.
It can also be done by going to ” Settings” then choosing ” Apps & Features ” and finally uninstalling any unnecessary app from the laptop.
5. Overheating
Heating is one of the crucial things which can damage your laptop battery badly. A temperature of more than 95 degrees Fahrenheit is enough to damage your battery for good.
You can take some steps which will help your battery life in the long run. Don’t keep your laptop inside a car or a place where the temperature can rise to 90 and go below 40 degrees. Too much heat and cold both put your battery life at risk.
Many people have a bad habit of using their laptop by keeping it on their lap, bed or mattress which increases the heat of the laptop and airflow gets stuck so it’s a must ignore thing to save laptop battery life.
In addition to that, if you have an old laptop then you can remove the battery sometime before leaving it connected for a long office or work hour. By doing this you can save it from extra heat.
Additional Read: How to keep your laptop cool
6. Battery consuming power settings
A lot of us like to have our laptops unleash their maximum potential. We want it to act as fast as it can, for that reason we have it use High performance or Ultimate performance [if your laptop supports it] modes.
If you’re running these modes unplugged, they’d eat through your battery in a flash. Not to mention, they put humongous levels of strain, as everything has to run in peak performance. So, if your battery is important to you, don’t use it while unplugged.
Adjusting your power settings on your laptop is a quick and easy way to save yourself some battery life. Go to the search bar, type “choose a power plan” and from there, enable the power saver option.
Another thing you can do is make a customized plan by using ”Power & Sleep” in the ”Settings”.You can pick your preferred time to ”Turn Off” screen in both ”Battery Power” and ”Plugged in” conditions. An ideal would be to select 5 mins for both.
In the same way, you can choose after how much time your laptop will be going to ” Sleep ” on battery power and charging condition.
If you are not a heavy user who does both gaming, official work, and video call on the same laptop then you can turn on the power saving mode any time.
When you switch into power saver mode, you will notice that your laptop gets a bit slower when doing some tasks such as surfing the internet or running a program.
The reason for this is that low-power mode throttles down your CPU so that your hard drive and CPU can use less power. This, in turn, gives you more time to use your laptop without having to charge it again.
In Power saver mode, you can expect up to an hour and a half more battery life over the standard high-performance setting.
There’s one other thing, if you’re on Windows 10, hover your mouse pointer on the bottom right and open the action center, you’ll find an icon named battery saver.
Now turn on the ”battery saver”. If you right-click it, you’ll have the option to select when your laptop will start this mode. By default, it’s fixed to 20%. Yes, both the power saver and battery saver are different modes and you can use them together. But it’ll make the laptop even slower. I suggest using it when you’re not doing any significant stuff on the laptop.
7. Keeping Wi-Fi & Bluetooth on
A lot of us, including me, have this specific bad trait, we keep our hands-free modes on even when we don’t need it. If I had a penny for how many times I’ve left the Bluetooth mode on even when I’m not using the Bluetooth headphones or didn’t turn off the Wi-Fi while I’m not using it, I’d be a millionaire.
Don’t be like me, whenever you do not require internet or connection with other devices simply turn off your laptop’s wi-fi and also the Bluetooth options.
Because they consume a good percentage of your laptop’s battery, especially the Wi-Fi. How? There are a lot of background programs that work using the internet, so even if you’re not actively doing something, there are definitely a few programs that are doing so. Not to mention frequent updates that the laptop automatically downloads.
So by turning them off while working offline would be an excellent method to save your battery from getting drained fast.
Both wifi and Bluetooth can be turned off either by directly choosing the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signal from the bottom right of your monitor. You can disable them from here by clicking on the signal.
Another way you can disable them is by going to the control panel where you will find the ‘’ Network and Internet’’ folder. Enter and then again enter the ‘’ Network Connections ‘’ folder. Now you can disable both wi-fi and Bluetooth from here.
Additional Read: How Many Watts Does A Laptop Consume?
8. Connection with any external device
When your laptop is connected with devices like a USB drive, wireless keyboard & mouse, and external Bluetooth speaker then your battery will drain fast as these devices use up a huge amount of battery energy.
Sometimes you can disconnect all of these to save your battery. Ultimately it will increase the overall battery life.
Most of these can be found on the right bottom of the laptop screen in the device option. You can select them and remove them from there.
9. Faulty battery
Sometimes, you just lose the lottery. Although chances are super slim, there is a one in a million chance that you’ve been dealt a bad hand with a faulty part in your laptop. If you feel like it has happened to you, contact the manufacturer and ask for a replacement.
10. Wear and tear
No matter how many tricks you implement, eventually, an electronic product will give out. It’s the bitter truth. Wear and tear is an inevitable scenario that any and every battery-operated device will face. As your gadget gets older, it will get more worn out, you can’t help it.
And, after a while, it’ll use up everything it has. At that point, the only thing to do is replace the laptop battery.
Tips to save battery life
When you use your laptop according to the best practices advised by the tech expert you can expect a long battery life.
- Any new laptop needs to be charged for 16-24 hours before the first use. Check the manufacturer’s instructions.
- In case when you will be leaving your laptop for around a month you should remove the battery. But if it’s non-removable then leave it on rest while it has a 50% charge. But don’t let it rest uncharged for too long.
- If you’re not using an old laptop, consider using it while plugged. You save battery cycles, and can also use high or ultimate performance. It’s a win-win situation!
- Don’t keep too many tabs open. Resource heavy browsers like Chrome would pounce on your battery otherwise.
- Reduce sync frequency. The less you can keep the background activity, the better. We mostly keep syncs for emails and calendars, try to see if you can offload these duties to your phone.
- Turn off location services. Sometimes it can come enabled by default, and uses a lot of resources. By keeping it off, you can add some more minutes to your battery.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Many Hours Should A Laptop Battery Last?
The average battery lasting hour for a laptop can be from 1.5-4 hours. However, from one model to another it will vary.
How Can I Make My Laptop Battery Last Longer?
Using power-saving mode, keeping the brightness normal, detaching external devices, charging the battery before full low, keeping wi-fi off and reducing heating issues, etc. will help the battery to last long.
How Much Time Should You Charge A New Laptop?
It’s recommended to charge for around 24 hours before the first time use.
Why Does My Laptop Battery Only Last 1 Hour?
If you keep running your laptop in high-performance mode then it won’t last much. Another reason might be an old battery that can’t last long.
What Are The Signs Of A Bad Laptop Battery?
Overheating the battery, not being able to charge while plugged, little time run makes the laptop shut down and replacement warning are the key signs of a bad laptop battery. In such a case, you have to buy a new laptop battery.
Parting Words
I have tried to show you the easy ways to save your battery from draining fast. If you can apply those correctly the change will be in front of your eyes.
Now you can stay worry-free wherever you are outside your home or workplace carrying your laptop.
I hope this article helped you find a solution to your laptop battery draining problem. Happy computing!