Battery life is something you can never get enough of. Every click, swipe, tweet and song draws life from an ever-diminishing pool of watts in your pocket or bag. Here’s a handful of ways you can extend the usable time of your gadgets.

Laptop

Upgrade your hard drive to a SSD

You can replace your laptop’s hard drive or make sure your next laptop is equipped with a Solid State Drive (SSD), which use a negligible amount of power and are much faster. Regular hard drives are like a record player: they use a motor to keep a physical disk spinning nearly all the time. As a result, a hard drive uses more power and generates more heat than a SSD, which is like a gigantic, lightning-fast USB flash drive. The faster response time also means you’re wasting less time and battery power waiting for the computer to process tasks. The main drawback is the cost: ~$1/GB for a SSD, compared to ~$0.15/GB for a hard drive. If you’re upgrading your existing laptop, you’ll need to reinstall the OS & applications and transfer your data as well.

Runtime gain: Moderate
Cost: High

Buy an Extended/Slice Battery

You can buy extended and/or “slice” batteries for many PC laptops, which can more than double the battery capacity. Unfortunately they also significantly increase the weight of the laptop and add to the size. Most extended batteries protrude past the edge of the laptop, and “slice” batteries cover the bottom of the laptop and increase the overall thickness.

Runtime gain: High
Cost: Moderate

Optimize Charging for Battery Lifespan

Most laptop manufacturers set their laptops to continuously charge the battery while plugged in to AC power, even when the battery is at 100%. A rechargeable battery’s capacity will naturally decrease with age and use, but continuous charging can drastically hasten the aging process. It doesn’t affect day-to-day battery use, but it can make a big difference when your battery can only hold half of it’s original charge after a year. This provides the manufacturer a chance to sell you a replacement battery or a battery warranty. Notable exceptions to this are Lenovo and Apple, which started optimizing for battery lifespan once they switched to non-removable batteries. If your battery is at 100% and you plan on using it near an AC outlet for a while, you can remove the battery to stop charging. Just be sure to save your work frequently and don’t pull the power cable out!

Runtime gain: Low
Cost: Free

Lower the Screen Brightness

Screen brightness is usually the single largest draw of power on a laptop. You can reduce it to the minimum that is comfortable to minimize the power usage.

Runtime gain: Moderate
Cost: Free

Buy a Travel charger

You can purchase a travel/compact charger for most laptops, which are usually far easier to carry with you on a day-to-day basis. You also get the added convenience of not having to unplug the regular charger every time you go out. Some have a cigarette-lighter attachment so you can charge your laptop while you drive. You can typically find a travel/compact charger from your laptop manufacturer’s website, and they’re around $60-$90.

Runtime gain: High (if you are near AC outlets)
Cost: Moderate

Use the Laptop Lockers in the Parnassus Library

The Parnassus Library has a set of laptop lockers in CL240. Each locker drawer has 2 AC outlets. Just bring your laptop, charger, and a padlock. You can charge your laptop (or other mobile device) securely while you eat lunch, go to the gym, or run errands.

Each locker has 2 AC plugs.

Runtime gain: High
Cost: Free

Turn Off Wifi

For times when you don’t need to use the internet – for instance if you are taking notes or working on a paper – turn off wifi. Wifi is a relatively small drain on power, but it adds up over time. You can always turn it on briefly if you need to look something up, plus it’s a small discouragement against distractions like Facebook, Twitter, or cuteoverload.com

Runtime gain: Low
Cost: Free

Remove Your DVD Drive

If your laptop has a removable DVD drive, you can remove it for slight reductions in power drain and weight . On some laptops (such as the Dell Latitude or Lenovo Thinkpad series) you can swap the DVD drive for an extra battery, which adds a moderate amount of battery capacity for a minor increase in weight.

Runtime gain: Low (DVD removal) / Moderate (battery replacement)
Cost: Free (DVD removal) / Moderate (battery replacement)

Phone

Buy a Compact Charger and spare USB Cable

You can buy pocket-sized USB chargers and extra USB cables for less than $5 each.  Amazon.com and Monoprice.com are good sources for both. Most non-Apple smartphones use a Micro USB cable, and third-party Apple charging cables work just the same as the official ones.The brand of mobile device doesn’t need to match the charger, as pretty much all USB chargers are interchangeable. If possible, get a charger that will put out 2A (amps), which is 4x the power a regular computer USB port provides. Even if you aren’t near an AC outlet, the spare USB cable will let you charge your phone from your laptop in a pinch.

Runtime gain: High
Cost: Low

Use Wifi Instead of Cellular Data

When you’re on campus, you can turn on wifi and use UCSFwpa instead of your cellular data service. Most 4G phones released prior to 2012 have less efficient 4G radios (the HTC Thunderbolt is a notable example), and wifi uses less power than 3G/4G cellular data. The UCSFwpa wifi network is also much faster, so you will waste less time and power waiting for things to load.

On an iPhone, you can turn cellular data on/off in Settings > General > Celluar

Runtime gain: Moderate
Cost: Free

Stop Apps that Run in the Background

Some apps stay running when you aren’t actively using them – mapping apps are one usual culprit because they tend to keep the GPS system on.

• You can end apps on an iPhone by double-clicking the home button and then tapping the on an app.
• On Android 4.0 and later you can hold the Home key or tap the button to show a list of all apps, and then swipe them left or right to close them.

Automatic task-killing apps aren’t really necessary with Android 4.0 and later due to improved application management and in some cases can actually reduce battery life.  Some Android phones come with apps that you can’t uninstall; if you never use them, you can disable them in Settings > Application manager.

Disabling an app prevents it from running.

Runtime gain: Low to Moderate
Cost: Free

Minimize Screen Brightness

Just as with laptops, the screen backlight is usually the largest single consumer of battery power on a smartphone and this is even more pronounced on tablets. You can turn the brightness down to the minimum you need to conserve battery power.

Runtime gain: Moderate
Cost: Free

Buy a Spare/Extended Battery and a Battery Charger

For phones with removable batteries, a spare or extended battery can extend your run time by double or more. To simplify the recharging process, you can also purchase a separate battery charger (as opposed to a device charger) so you can charge your spare battery separately from the one in your phone. You can also buy an external battery pack, which is helpful for devices with non-removable batteries. Some provide you with a USB charging slot and you can also find external batteries molded into an iPhone case, like those made by morphie.

Runtime gain: High
Cost: Moderate

Install a Battery Monitoring App to Unveil Thirsty Apps

I use a free Android app called Battery Mix to keep an eye on estimated run time and also see which apps are using the most power. It also will give you an estimate of how much run time you have left, how long a full charge will take, and the power usage of individual apps or processes.

BatteryMix battery history and per-process power usage

Android 4.0 and above also has decent power use tracking in Settings > Battery

Runtime gain: Moderate
Cost: Free

There are 3 basic ways to get more life out of your gadgets: make them faster, reduce the battery “burn rate”, and charge them whenever you can. If you’ve got a tip for getting more use out of your gadget, please share it in the comments below. Likewise, let us know if you try any of these tips and see a noticeable gain in useful life of your device.