Sunday, November 12, 2006

10 tips to extend laptop battery life..

For those who own laptops, there is nothing more irritating than having that low battery signal flashing on your screen. I have compiled a list of helpful hints and tips that will hopefully conserve, save, and extend battery life.

1) Power down all nonessential functions: If you're not using it, turn it off. Your wireless card consumes a lot of battery life even if you are not using it because it constantly is searching for networks. If you are running any large programs that you don't need, shut them down.

2) Laptop Screen Brightness: The screen brightness is one of the fastest way to drain a battery. Be sure to turn it down a few levels to help consume battery life.

3) Turn off Monitor: Set the monitor to turn off after one minute of the laptop being inactive.

4) Don't listen to music: Turn off the speaker volume or avoid listening to music directly from your laptop. Use your iPod if you have one.

5) Avoid plugging in accessories: Avoid connecting other accessories into your laptop like a wireless mouse, an iPod, camera, etc.

6) Don't multi-task: Doing multiple things at once on your laptop will increase CPU usage and drain the battery. Try to do one thing at a time.

7) Configure before trips: While your laptop is plugged in, configure the power settings so that you are going to be using the least amount of power during your trip to ensure maximum battery life.

8) Keeping cool: The fans in some laptops are designed to turn on, or speed up, at certain thermal thresholds. If you are able to keep your laptop below these temperatures, you will keep the fans off, and conserve battery power.

9) Empty the tank and refill it: If you don't use your laptop for a period of time, you must fully discharge then recharge the battery. This will help to calibrate your battery and extend its life.

10) Sweet, sweet sleep: Put your computer to sleep whenever you are not actively using it. Sleep mode shuts off the monitor, hard disk, and processor, while preserving everything in RAM. When you return and activate your computer, you can resume working just where you left off.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

#9 is no longer true.
new batteries don't have a memory like that

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