How to Increase laptop battery life

8. When you are going to leave your laptop alone for a couple of hours but want to keep you work open you have three choices. One, you could leave the laptop running, which is a waste and should never be done unless it is doing something in the background e.g. virus scan. Two, you could put the computer on standby, so all the work left open gets stored in the RAM and you can quickly resume when you get back, but the computer uses some power. Three, hibernate so all the documents left open get stored on the hard disk, but the computer completly shuts down. It really depends on how long you are going to leave it for, but i would recommend to hibernate all the time so no power is wasted, and only takes a couple more seconds to wake up than standby. 9. Keep the temperature down. Laptop batteries discharge quicker when they are hot, so never leave them in hot cars and clean out the airvents every so often. 10. Use the operating system’s power options to optimise the power usage. The best profile is Max Battery for Windows XP and power saver for Vista. 11. This one is for more advanced users. Rightmark CPU clock utility enables users to undervolt their CPU, but without loosing much, if any performance. It also reduces the need for a fan, as less heat is produced. Look it up in Google to findo out more info. 12. Go easy on the usage. Try to focus on one thing at a time and manage your priorities. Word Processing and reading e-mails use less power than gaming or watching DVD’s. 13. If you really want to save power, get rid of Windows. If you use Linux or buy an Apple Laptop with Mac OS X, you can expect to increase the life by over an hour. Apple’s Macbook has a six hour battery life, Windows laptops barely get half that. 14. If you are going to leave the battery and not use it for a while, make sure that you leave the battery at 40% and never leave a Li-ion battery completely discharged otherwise it will ruin the battery and probably won’t work. 15. Get a more efficiant laptop. Modern laptops get more efficiant every year. A Lenovo laptop, for example, with a 9-cell battery seems to last forever.

Posted in: Computers