When you’re out and about with your Mac laptop, there are a few things you can do to extend your battery life. First, I shut off Bluetooth in the menu bar, then bump down the screen brightness as much as I can stand, close applications I’m not using, and if I’m desperate, turn off AirPort. That’ll do the most to prolong my battery life, but it sure hampers the experience of using my Mac.

BatterySqueezer is designed to throttle background applications to cut down their CPU load, eking more battery life for you, while freeing up resources for what you’re working on. It defaults to throttling your browsers, and in the Preferences menu you can also add Microsoft Office apps, iWork apps, the Mac App Store, and Preview. There’s also a checkbox to limit BatterySqueezer’s activity to when you’re actually running on battery power (unplugged).

 
When it’s running, BatterySqueezer will throttle your browsers—including their plug-ins, like Flash—and selected applications when you switch to another app. Using Activity Monitor, you can see an immediate drop-off: playing a YouTube video in Chrome showed Flash using around 18 percent of my CPU, but when I switched to TextEdit, Chrome and Flash dropped down to less than 1 percent almost instantly. The drawback? If you like to watch web videos while, uh, “multitasking” in another window, that won’t work—the video doesn’t automatically pause, but it gets so stuttery and slow that you’ll want to pause it yourself.

The bottom line. For the price of a latte, you could have a longer-lasting Mac.