Top 10 ways to increase battery life on an Apple Macbook

1. The first way is to decrease the backlight brightness since the display takes up the largest amount of power on any notebook. You can do this by pressing the F1 key to lower the brightness. This tip may seem obvious but reducing the display to 50% can increase the battery life by 1+ hours.

2. Open up system preferences and look for the Energy Saver section. Under this section click on the Battery tab. Now here you can select when to put the computer to sleep after not being used for a period of time. I would recommend setting it to 10 to 15 minutes, however use a setting that is suitable for you.

3. Under the same section you can also select when to put the display to sleep. I would recommend setting the display to sleep after 3 minutes to give the best battery life, but at the same time still being usable.

4. You can also select to put the Hard Disk to sleep when possible. This will spin down the hard disk after 10 minutes of inactivity and will help to improve the battery life of your Apple Laptop.

5. The other settings on this page 'Slightly dim the display when using this power source' and 'Automatically reduce the display brightness before sleep' can also be enabled which will give you them few extra minutes that you need when out and about.

6. Quit applications that you are not using. In some applications in Mac OS X when you close the window using the red x at the top left of the window, it does not actually close the application. To quit the application select the app in the Dock, right click and select Quit. Or a quicker way is to press Command Q when the window is open.

7. Turn off the Wifi/Bluetooth when not using them since these use lots of battery power. To turn them off select the icons at the top of the screen then choose 'Turn Airport Off' or 'Turn Bluetooth Off'.

8. Turn off Widgets. To do this open up Dashboard, click on the + icon at the bottom left of the page, then you should see an x on each of your widgets which closes them. Even better, turn off the Dashboard completely as this will save CPU cycles and will lower RAM and Virtual Memory usage considerably depending on how many widgets you have. To turn off the Dashboard enter the following two commands into Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
killall Dock

However i choose to keep the Dashboard enabled as i find it useful. To re-enable the Dashboard simply enter the command above changing the YES to NO and then enter killall Dock.

9. Run Software Update to ensure you the latest software and security, since Apple sometimes release Firmware that may reduce power consumption, therefore higher battery life.

10. If you are using a Mac with an Intel Chipset then you can select the 'Better Battery Life' which puts the display to sleep after one minute of inactivity and also reduces the processor performance giving you better battery life.