How to Make Your Laptop Battery Last Longer

So you’re using your laptop and, all of the sudden, it dies. There was no battery warning from Windows—in fact, you recently checked and Windows said you had 30% battery power left. What’s going on?

Even if you treat your laptop’s battery properly, its capacity will decrease over time. Its built-in power meter estimates how much juice available and how much time on battery you have left—but it can sometimes give you incorrect estimates.

This basic technique will work in Windows 10, 8, 7, Vista. Really, it will work for any device with a battery, including older MacBooks. It may not be necessary on some newer devices, however.

If you’re taking proper care of your laptop’s battery, you should be allowing it to discharge somewhat before plugging it back in and topping it off. You shouldn’t be allowing your laptop’s battery to die completely each time you use it, or even get extremely low. Performing regular top-ups will extend your battery’s life.

However, this sort of behavior can confuse the laptop’s battery meter. No matter how well you take care of the battery, its capacity will still decrease as a result of unavoidable factors like typical usage, age, and heat. If the battery isn’t allowed to run from 100% down to 0% occasionally, the battery’s power meter won’t know how much juice is actually in the battery. That means your laptop may think it’s at 30% capacity when it’s really at 1%—and then it shuts down unexpectedly.

Calibrating the battery won’t give you longer battery life, but it will give you more accurate estimates of how much battery power your device has left.

How to Manually Calibrate a Battery To Make It Last Long

While it’s a good idea to use any included utilities or just follow instructions specific to your laptop, you can also perform battery calibration without any specialized tools. The basic process is simple:

Charge your laptop’s battery to full—that’s 100%.
Let the battery rest for at least two hours, leaving the computer plugged in. This will ensure that the battery is cool and not still hot from the charging process. You’re free to use your computer normally while it’s plugged in, but be sure it doesn’t get too hot. You want it to cool down.
Go into your computer’s power management settings and set it to automatically hibernate at 5% battery. To find these options, head to Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options > Change plan settings > Change advanced power settings. Look under the “Battery” category for the “Critical battery action” and “Critical battery level” options. (If you can’t set it to 5%, just set it as low as you can—for example, on one of our PCs, we couldn’t set these options below 7% battery.)

Pull the power plug and leave your laptop running and discharging until it automatically hibernates. You can keep using your computer normally while this happens.

NOTE: If you want to calibrate the battery while you aren’t using the computer, be sure your computer isn’t set to automatically sleep, hibernate, or turn its display off while idle. If your computer automatically enters power-saving mode while you’re away, it will save power and won’t discharge properly. To find these options, head to Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options > Change plan settings.

Allow your computer to sit for five hours or so after it automatically hibernates or shuts down.
Plug your computer back into the outlet and charge it all the way back up to 100%. You can keep using your computer normally while it charges.
Ensure any power management settings are set to their normal values. For example, you probably want your computer to automatically power off the display and then go to sleep when you’re not using it to save battery power. You can change these settings while the computer charges.
Your laptop should now be reporting a more accurate amount of battery life, sparing you any surprise shutdowns and giving you a better idea of how much battery power you have at any given time.
The key to calibration is allowing the battery to run from 100% to almost empty, then charging it all the way up to 100% again, which may not happen in normal use. Once you’ve gone through this full charge cycle, the battery will know how much juice it has and report more accurate readings.