Tips on Improving Battery Life
Ensuring your portable pal is primed and ready to run at all times is paramount, otherwise you may as well go back to using a bulky desktop computer. Laptopical's Matt Brodsky has unearthed some useful information to maximise your battery longevity.
Today'snewest laptops can last for hours and hours. Like true workhorses, they power for entire trans-Atlantic flights. But theselaptops don't come cheap. As if they have their hands on the nextdigital-computing Wilt Chamberlain, manufacturers like IBM andSony know the value of extending laptop battery life. Indeed,battery longevity is possibly one of the most important aspectsof mobile computing.
So the restof us poor schleps, with older version laptops, with far fewerhours of battery power-say, two at most-are left to read thein-flight magazine or the instructions on the barf bag when ourbatteries konk out, while our computer betters get it on allnight long with their notebooks.
Not necessarily. There are several things you can do to makeyour laptop's battery last longer. Step one is to cut down on thejuice that your hard drive is using. You can do this by taking care of it regularly with DiskDefragmenter, which allows your hard drive to find data easier.Then you can also make your Windows' page file run smoother. Pagefile acts as RAM when your RAM is full. Set it to 1.5 times thecapacity of installed memory.
Next, reduce the juice that your display is using. You can lowerthe brightness, which may boost your battery life by an hour.Also try cutting down on the battery-sucking of unused devices,such as your laptop's Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, infrared receiver and Ethernet.
Then take care of your laptop's start-up programs. These aregenerally annoying little applications that open up every timeyour computer boots up, without you wanting or needing them. Theyjust add extra work for your processor, and suck your batterydry. You can disable them in the Start/Programs/Startupfolder.
Best of all, pamper your laptop battery. If you want it to to perform. So when you first get your notebook, charge it to 100percent, run it down completely, then recharge it to 100 percent.That'll learn it endurance! If it's too late for that, then atleast always make sure to charge your battery to 100 percentevery time you charge it. And keep it away from extremely hightemps. They'll wilt a battery quicker than you can say WiltChamberlain.
