How to make out most of your Laptop battery

It’s always a dilemma when you are in the middle of some important work and your laptop gives you that annoying message telling you that the battery is now critical, and the laptop will soon go into the hibernation mode. Well, with a little more care and a few simple and easy steps can help you increase your laptop battery capacity and also its life span letting you use it for a longer time.
Laptop-Battery

1. Switch-off unused wireless radios: Most wireless devices on a laptop keep draining the battery if switched on, even when they are not being used. So when the laptop is being used on battery power, it’s advisable to turn off the WiFi and Bluetooth services if you don’t require them at that moment.
2. Reducing the brightness of the screen: The backlight of the LCD display consumes a significant amount of battery when it’s kept at the brightest setting. Dimming down the brightness to a comfortable level can give the laptop up to 30 minutes of extra backup.
3. External devices: Most USB devices and other external devices like external hard drives or USB lights or even USB mice should be switched off and removed if not in use. For example, charging an iPod when using the laptop on battery is a very bad idea unless absolutely necessary, as it will keep draining the battery. The same goes for the integrated CD or DVD player. One should keep it empty when not in use as the rotor keeps rotating when there is a CD or DVD placed in the drive.
4. Get some extra RAM: Whenever a laptop runs short of RAM memory it end up shifting to the virtual memory which results in hard disk use, which is a much less efficient option in terms of power consumption. Putting in extra RAM does use more power, so don’t get too much extra, but when compared to the use of virtual memory it’s a more efficient option.
5. Shutdown background apps: It’s always a good idea to shut down all those background applications which you don’t regularly require (like desktop search applications), as they use CPU processing power and consequently consume battery power.
6. Use energy saving options on the OS: One can always optimize the power options available in the power settings to get maximum battery life. The notebook should be instructed to shut down the hard drives and turn the display off whenever not in use.
7. Improve battery cycle: For a healthy Lithium-ion based battery, it is always suggested to keep the electrons that are present inside in motion occasionally. That means it’s never a good idea to keep you laptop plugged in or on charge all the time as the electrons lose their ability to store energy. One should let it discharge fully and charge it completely at least once a month to keep the battery as good as new.
8. Try to reduce multitasking: When using the laptop on battery power, one should try as much as possible to use one application at a time, and should ideally shut one application completely before opening another, to reduce consumption of both processing and battery power.
9. Defrag regularly: When a hard drive is defragmented disk puts lesser stress on the battery and hard disk as it takes lesser time to find files, so in order to make the hard drive efficient one should perform defragmentation regularly, which should be at least once every month.
10. Hibernate: When running on battery, hibernating the laptop is always a healthier option than putting it on standby, or shutting it down. This is because the laptop’s hibernate mode saves it in the state it was hibernated in, and does not require the laptop to reboot all applications, thereby using much less power.


Posted on : Friday, July 16, 2010 Leave a Comment (0)