I am very impressed with how long the Apple MacBook battery holds a charge. But as a gadget geek, I am always trying to tweak things, and extending the battery life of my MacBook, or PC laptop for that matter, is something I do often. Here are a few simple tricks that will really extend the life of your MacBook battery.

A word of warning for the advanced MacBook user, this might seem logical and basic to you, but you’d be surprised to discover the number of people who don’t think about this.

So, the easiest, quickest, and most overlooked way to extend your MacBook battery life is to adjust the brightness of your MacBook display.   This is very easy to accomplish with the F1 and F2 keys on your keyboard. I find the MacBook display to be so bright, that I can really adjust the brightness lower with little to no impact on my viewing comfort.  Obviously if you are in direct sunlight this won’t work, but I don’t like to work on my computer in the sun anyways.  This simple step can increase your MacBook battery life substantially, allowing me to drink several Starbucks grande coffees on one battery charge!

The next quickest, and easiest way to extend your MacBook battery is to bring up your system preferences screen, and click on Energy Saver:

Then, click the Better Battery Life button at the top . From there, you can play around with the computer sleep minutes and the Display Sleep minutes to maximize your battery life.   I find that for my needs, setting the computer sleep to 15 minutes and the display sleep somewhere roughly in the middle of 1 and 15 minutes.   I then click the first three buttons below the slides as shown in the picture below. These settings seem to give me the best battery life performance for my MacBook.

So, there ya have it.  A simple, logical way to extend your MacBook battery life, allowing you to get out of the house/office for a few hours each day.  Hmmm, now that all you newbies can extend your Macbook battery life, I’ll probably have trouble finding a table at my favorite local Starbucks.