Tips to Extend Your Laptops Battery Life

If you can't run your laptop without being plugged in every other minute, you might as well have a desk top. A laptop simply isn't much use if the battery doesn't last.

In the interests of saving your sanity, here are some tips for increasing battery life, so you can finally cut the cord once in a while.

Tips for Older Batteries

To start with, turn your screen brightness down. A bright screen may be necessary on a bright summer day, but most of us don't do a lot of computer time sitting in the sun. A good way to determine brightness is turn it down until it's a bit too dark, then wait five minutes. Once your eyes have adjusted to the new screen setting, if you need to, you can turn the brightness up incrementally until it suits your current location.

Next, make sure you defrag your hard drive regularly. Defragmenting makes the computer run more efficiently, and the more efficiently your laptop runs, the less power it uses. You should defrag anywhere between once a month and once a week.

When you're using your computer, try to run only one program at a time. (Bonus: the fewer programs you run, the less distracted you'll be from your work.) The more programs you run, the faster your battery will run down, and computer games especially use up a lot of power, so play them sparingly when you're away from a plug.

In addition to shutting down programs, you can shut down devices. A wi-fi connection is a major power hog. You can shut it down when ever you are not using internet based programs, and add quite a bit of battery life. Avoiding using the disk drives will also save a lot of power. If you need something off a disk, load it just long enough to save it to the hard drive, and then pull the disk.

Along the same lines, don't use standby mode, if you can avoid it. Hibernation saves your settings and shuts down, while standby continues to use power.

Finally, you can disable your unneeded start up items. In addition to cutting down on the annoying start up wait time, it saves power during start up and as long as your computer is on.

Tip for a New Battery

A new laptop battery needs to be conditioned to get the most out of it. You can condition your battery when it's new by charging it completely, and then letting it run dry. When you recharge it, charge to the full 100%. This sets the battery to remember how much charge it can hold. After doing this, you won't ever need to discharge the battery entirely again.

Conclusion

Hopefully these tips will be new to you, and will help you in your daily rounds. Following them will make sure that next time you stop at a cafe to get some work done, you won't need to cut your outing short for lack of battery. Happy surfing.