by James Klann | James@fndtn.com

With laptop sales contributing a sizable percentage of Apple’s growth, we thought it might not be a bad idea to pass along some tips on how to increase the time one can run off their battery. We’ll start with the easiest and work our way down to the more complex:

1. Manually reduce the brightness of your screen via the function keys.
2. Ensure that you’re not running any bus powered devices such as USB keyboards, mice, external Firewire drives etc. If your battery is running other devices, that’s less energy that can go towards running your machine.
3. If possible, cut down on using applications that access the hard drive consistently. Quicktime and Photoshop are both perfect examples. Since they’re constantly accessing the drive, they drain the battery quicker. Word processing apps, such as Word, also constantly read/write to the drive, so if you’re working on a paper or presentation you might want to do the initial draft in Text Edit and then paste the data into a Word file.
4. The Energy Saver Preference Pane has a preconfigured setting for running off of Battery. If you select the Better Battery Life optimization option the following items are adjusted automatically: both machine and hard drive go to sleep after 5 minutes of inactivity while the display goes to sleep after 1 minute. In addition to putting devices to sleep, the brightness of the display and processor performance is reduced. If there are certain settings that you’d like to adjust, it’s totally customizable and can be tailored to your individual needs.
5. Via the Network preferences, disable the ports that you don’t need at that time. While they may not be in use, they still require power to run, So if you don’t need them, turn them off. Most laptops have Airport, Bluetooth, Ethernet, Firewire and Modem, all of which are active by default. Most times you only need one, maybe two, of the ports enabled. In network preferences, if you click on the “Show” tab and go down to “Network Port Configuration,” you can select which ports you’d like to have running. Turn off whichever ports you don’t need and apply the changes. If you’d like to save the settings for easy access in the future, you can create a new location that’s preconfigured for next time around. A nice side benefit of creating locations for your port settings is that you have quick access to them from your Apple menu in the Finder so changing them in the future is a piece of cake.
6. One last thing to consider is turning off any network protocols (Appletalk and TCP/IP) that you don’t need. This can be accomplished in the Network Preference Pane as well. TCP/IP can be turned off in the TCP/IP tab  by selecting “off” under the Configure IPv4 pulldown tab. Appletalk can be disabled by turning it off under the Appletalk tab. Again, you can save these changes under a specific location, making it easier to turn the services off in the future.