Improve Battery Life of Your Laptop

gopi_vbboy · 12-09-2008, 10:00 PM

You may have a very high-end laptop with lots of RAM, latest processor chip and an extremely powerful graphics card but still the battery inside your laptop computer or Tablet PC remains the weakest link – the average battery life is anywhere between three and four hours for most notebook models.

Our most common wish is that the laptop battery should last as long as possible so that we remain connected, informed and productive.

Lets see some hacks to maximize the battery life-

Dim the Bright LCD Screen – Most laptops come with the ability to dim your laptop screen. Some even come with ways to modify CPU and cooling performance. Cut them down to the lowest level you can tolerate to squeeze out some extra battery juice.Possibly use a black color background and themes.

Cut down external devices - If you are using the laptop for offline work, like composing emails or giving final touches to that PowerPoint presentation, there’s no point checking for Wi-Fi network in your area when you are not going to use it anyway. Most laptops have shortcut keys to instantly disable wireless networking.

Cut down on programs running in the background– You could have several maintenance related processes running on your hard-drive which can be turned off temporarily. Examples include the desktop search software that’s configured to index new files on the fly or any IM clients sitting in the system tray or any scheduled tasks that auto-run at pre-defined intervals.

Defragment the Hard Disk – Defragmenting will try to put all the piece of a file in a sequence so it will take less effort to see a file. You may notice a marginal jump in computing speed after defragmentation plus it also helps in extending the very precious life of your battery.

Turn off the Auto-save document feature of Microsoft Office and other applications. Programs that are run from a CD or DVD can be copied to and run from the hard drive, which typically consumes less power than an optical drive.

Add more RAM - This will allow you to process more with the memory your laptop has, rather than relying on virtual memory. Virtual memory results in hard drive use, and is much less power efficient. Note that adding more RAM will consume more energy, so this is most applicable if you do need to run memory intensive programs which actually require heavy usage of virtual memory.

Run off a hard drive rather than CD/DVD - As power consuming as hard drives are, CD and DVD drives are worse. Even having one in the drive can be power consuming. They spin, taking power, even when they?re not actively being used. Wherever possible, try to run on virtual drives rather than optical ones.

Keep the battery contacts clean: Clean your battery’s metal contacts every couple of months with a cloth moistened with rubbing alcohol. This keeps the transfer of power from your battery more efficient.

Take care of your battery - Exercise the Battery. Do not leave a charged battery dormant for long periods of time. Once charged, you should at least use the battery at least once every two to three weeks. Also, do not let a Li-On battery completely discharge. (Discharing is only for older batteries with memory effects)

Hibernate not standby - Although placing a laptop in standby mode saves some power and you can instantly resume where you left off, it doesn’t save anywhere as much power as the hibernate function does. Hibernating a PC will actually save your PC’s state as it is, and completely shut itself down.

Don’t multitask - Do one thing at a time when you’re on battery. Rather than working on a spreadsheet, letting your email client run in the background and listening to your latest set of MP3’s, set your mind to one thing only. If you don’t you’ll only drain out your batteries before anything gets completed!
Set up and optimize your power options - Go to ‘Power Options’ in your windows control panel and set it up so that power usage is optimized (Select the ‘max battery’ for maximum effect).
Keep operating temperature down - Your laptop operates more efficiently when it’s cooler. Clean out your air vents with a cloth or keyboard cleaner.

Also remember to fully charge a new battery pack before carrying it with you on an important business trip. New batteries should be fully charged and discharged a few times before they work to their maximum capacity.

Not all these points are my own tips......Ofcourse i did take somepoints from other sites + added my own ideas.I hope this would be useful.....