-Whether you're new to Windows Phone 8 or have been rocking it since 2012, it is never a bad time to make sure you're getting as much battery life as possible.
Decreasing brightness and disabling Wi-Fi when you're not using it are a couple obvious tips, but there are also some other settings buried in the system and they could be seriously draining your battery.
All right, head to Settings and follow along.
Most of what we're doing is disabling unnecessary features, but if you actually use one, keep it enabled, obviously.
Okay, first, go to Wi-Fi and tap Advanced and uncheck these two boxes.
Now, your phone won't waste energy always looking for hot spots.
Now, back in Settings, click on Tap and Send and turn it off.
Okay, there are few more things you should tweak in the System Settings menu.
Go to e-mail and accounts, and
for each account, adjust the Download New Content option to the lowest frequency you're comfortable with.
If you can, choose manually, otherwise, go for hourly.
Now, head back and go to Backup.
Backing up your data is really important, but it will be less of a drain on your battery if you did it manually.
So, turn off each Backup option, and then, when you do wanna back up your data, enable it and hit Backup Now.
And finally, go to Phone Update and
uncheck Automatically Download Updates.
Now, your phone will still tell you if there's an update, but it won't download it automatically, which is the worst when you're trying to be careful about your battery life.
Okay, back in the Settings menu, swipe over to Applications.
Here, we'll take a few important things.
Under Background Tasks, you'll see apps have permission to run in the background.
Go through this list and block any apps you don't absolutely need.
Now, go to Games and turn off Connect with
Xbox and Sync game requests.
Again, if you use these features, leave them enabled.
Head back and go to Music plus Videos.
Here, turn off Connect with Xbox Music and this Cloud Collection feature, if you don't use it.
With these changes, you should see a significant increase in your phone's battery life, and if you want even more battery saving tips, check out the extended guide on CNET How-To.
And if you have a tip of your own, don't be shy, let me know on Twitter.
For CNET, I'm Sharon Vaknin.
