Your effective HP laptop battery life may vary greatly from the figures presented to you on the laptop's marketing material. Many different factors affect the overall battery life for the HP laptops, such as screen brightness, processing demands and wireless Internet reception. Altering several configuration settings and your computer usage habits can dramatically increase your laptop's battery life.
1. Reduce the amount of programs you have running at one time. Your full list of running programs may be much larger than you see on your system tray. Hold down "ctrl," "alt" and "del" to access the task manager. Click "Processes" and click "Username" so you can see all of the non-system programs running. Some programs automatically load when you start up your computer. If you don't need them on, select the programs and click "End Task" and "Yes" to shut them down and use less CPU power.
2. Hold down the "FN" key and hit "F3" to lower your brightness. Your screen brightness is a significant battery drain and lowering the brightness by even a few degrees helps out greatly.
3. Change your power options profile. Go to "Start," "Control Panel" and "System and Security." Click "Power Options." Select "Balanced" and click "Change Power Settings." The main page gives you options on when to shut down the display and hard drive, as well as a slider to set the default brightness for battery power and plugged in states. Click "Change advanced power settings" if you want to adjust power options on a case by case basis. You can reduce usage or turn off many aspects of your laptop to save power.
4. Unplug all peripherals from your laptop and remove PCMCIA and memory cards from your interface slots. Each interface slot uses power and if you have many devices hooked up at once the power drain is significant.
5. Turn off Wi-Fi. Most HP laptops have a sliding button on the front of the laptop case. Sliding it sets it to off, indicated by the light changing from blue to orange.