Tips to Get the Most Battery Life

I use my laptop in class for notes a lot. I need to have at least 2 hours of battery life. When i was on vista i would be able to get about 2 hours and 20-30 minutes of battery life. Now that i upgraded to windows 7 over the weekend, today i got only about 1 hour and 5 or 10 minutes. why such a drastic change?

so far i have the setting on power saver mode and bring down the brightness to a little more than the lowest setting. anything else i can do or adjust. thanks

turn off the Wifi card... install the power manager from the laptop manufacturer, it may give you more options. Check if BIOS has additional options.

make sure that your drivers are up to date, a bad driver could be causing power drain. that is a big difference in battery life though, is there anything you were running in the background?

Turn off Aero. The better graphics use more juice.

Make sure you leave your laptop on one night and let windows run threw its normal stuff ie indexing, defrag virus scans, if the laptop is off when its set to do this the next time the machine boots it runs all of this causing a drain on battery life. Once a week leave the laptop on over night turning off hybernation and sleep so it can make it threw its paces.

very good point DarkXeno

Laptops use cpu speed throttling by setting different multipliers and creating different CPU speeds based on demand. There are power states set automatically for each power state or P-state.

These are set to save power but also set to work on all CPUs all the time. It is almost a sure thing that in order to ensure that all the laptops work well in all P-states the Maker set those voltages WAY WAY WAY higher than they need to be.

I used a program called CPUgenie to test and manually tweak my P=State voltages way down and increased my run time a great deal. It also makes my CPU and entire laptop run much cooler. Max load is 24C cooler! In fact Prime 95 would cause thermal shut throttling on my laptop, now the CPU temp never goes above 70C

This is the most effective tip for extending battery life I am aware of.