Fed up of your laptop battery not lasting long enough? Are you having to switch to mains power half way through a gig. Well there are plenty of things you can configure on your computer which will maximize your battery life without effecting your computers performance.

What eats up your battery life?

The trick to maximizing your battery life is to figure out what is eating it up in the first place and then decide whether or not you need to have it running. This could be software, external USB powered devices, CD drives, cooling fan etc. If you follow the guide lines in this article then you will extend your battery life but there might be other factors in your own setup that i haven't covered here. Keep track of your battery life too by taking notes of what changes you have made.

Software that will help

There is software that will help you maximize your battery life. what this software does is to save the changes you have made to your system as profiles. You can then switch between these profiles quickly to save battery power. The software usually manages screen brightness, cooling fan power, CPU processing power among other things. Nearly all laptops come with this software already installed, it might be called power saver, battery monitor or something along those lines.

Screen brightness

The brightness of the LCD screen in your laptop will effect your battery life considerably. The deal here is to go as low as you can. If your using the laptop as a sound module i.e. playing soft synths, keyboard emulators or running guitar software then the chances are you probably don't need to see the screen very often. In this case set it as low as it can go, you'll still be able to see it if you need to look at it. If your performing live with Ableton Live or DJ'ing then this can be tricky as you need to see the screen alot. Experiment to see how low you can go. To change the screen brightness use the power management software that comes with your laptop or if your using a mac they have a dedicated screen brightness button.

Wifi card

Chances are when your on stage you won't be checking your email, if you are then something's not right! The wifi card in your laptop can consume more power than you'd like to think. Although newer models are getting less power hungry it still makes a difference when trying to maximize battery life. Most wifi cards have a little switch on the front or side of your laptop case which will switch it off. Don't forget to turn off the wireless network software too, you won't need it.

Keep it cool

The fan inside your laptop uses a lot of power when it cools off your processor. Of course the higher the processing power the more the fan runs, which is hard to minimize when audio software uses a lot of CPU. Well one way around it is to keep you computer as cool as it can be. Don't position it on top of hot amps or keyboards and always make sure the fan slot is never blocked or covered. You can actually change how often the fan comes on and off with power management software. Be careful of setting this too low as your computer will start to overheat and the CPU power will be greatly reduced. On mac's you can monitor the temperature of your CPU with the help of a free widget.

Minimize USB & firewire power usage

Having USB or firewire power all your devices is great as it makes everything much more portable but it does come at a cost, It will drain your battery quickly. The only way around this is to power your devices via an external power supply. Most keyboards, controllers and audio interfaces will have an external power supply socket but some won't and you'll just have to live with it. You can still connect them by USB or firewire but just make sure they aren't running off the computers power.

CD drive

CD drives on laptops are extremely power hungry. Anybody who's ever watched a DVD on their laptop will know this. Don't ever and i mean ever, use the CD drive for a laptop performance, if your loading samples from a DVD, copy the DVD to your hard drive and load them from there. Not only are you risking dropouts, errors, slow loading times and read/write errors you are killing your laptop battery big time. Don't even have a CD/DVD in the drive as sometimes the drive will randomly check it. You can disable the whole CD/DVD drive easily through the windows control panel, which will save power.

CPU power

When maximizing your battery life CPU power is a double edged sword because music software naturally uses quite a lot and alot of CPU wears down your battery. The trick is to use low CPU power software and save it where ever you can. Power management software can set the limit of CPU power but you should never ever use this as it throttles your CPU! Just be weary of what software you use live and try and disable any unneeded processing been done.

Sample rate

When playing live there is no need to use a 96K sample rate for your audio interface, it will add extra CPU processing and wear your battery down quicker. Use 44.1K or lower, you won't notice the difference in a live environment and nobody else will either. You can change the sample rate via the control panel of your audio interface.

Stop unused programs

Stop any unnecessary programs from running. Virus and firewall's are a good start as you won't need them if you've disabled your wifi card. Any other programs such as MSN messagener, itunes helper or email software that runs in the background of your system. All these will take up more CPU power and therefore drain more battery power. You can check what programs are running on a windows computer by opening the task manager (press ALT + Control + Delete together) and then kill them by right clicking and selecting end process tree.

Conclusion

Well i guess that's it, if you implement all these battery life maximizing tips then your battery should last a lot longer. Like i said earlier there might be factors unique to your machine which could drain the battery. Experiment and strip your system down to see how far you can push the battery life. If you have any questions please post them in the forum and i will answer them.

Good luck!

Zander

Akai MPK25 review

Published: 15. 05. 2008     10 comments

We take a look at the Akai MPK25 midi controller, the smallest of the Akai MPK series of midi controller/keyboard/MPC drum pad/trigger. This is a feature packed controller and promises a lot but does it live up to it's creators repretation?