I traded up to a Nikon d5300 from d3100 recently. I find the battery life is rather short compared the d3100. Does keeping the D5300 GPS utility drain the battery quicker? Also what can I do to keep battery charge longer?
I rarely use the monitor and never use live view, and have image view turned off.
Yes, having GPS turned on will drain the battery pretty quickly. This is true of any camera, not just the D5300. Not much you can do about it if you want your photos GPS tagged.
If you turn GPS off, you should find that the D5300 has pretty much the same battery life as your D3100: 600 shots for the D5300 vs 550 shots for the D3100. Camera battery life is measured under standard conditions, so don't read too much into the absolute numbers, but the relative difference between the two (or the lack of, in this case) can give you useful information.
If you want to keep the gps feature on you could always buy an extended battery. B&H Photography has one here . For 50 dollars it will probably bump up your battery life to higher than your d3100. In addition you could use a speedlight instead of the built in flash as speedlights have batteries of their own.
Extended battery (doubles the number of batteries you can insert from 1 to 2):
(Picture from link above)
