Battery life saving tips

22 Laptop Battery Life Saving Tips & Tricks
A collection of laptop battery life savings tips.

1. Dimming your laptop screen is one of the best and easiest ways to increase your laptop batteries run time.
2. Turn off your Wi-Fi wireless and Bluetooth if not needed. Most laptops have shortcut keys or even a physical switch to quickly disable wireless networking. This is a another great quick way to increase battery run time.
3. Tweak your computers power options. We like to choose a laptop power scheme that turns off the notebook monitor and hard disk after ten minutes or less of inactivity.
4. Decrease your laptops speaker volume or even mute it all together if not in use. This is a quick way to gain a little extra juice.
5. Disabling various scheduled tasks that you may have running in the background can conserve CPU cycles and thus increase battery run time.
6. Don't play computer games, music CD's or DVD movies for multimedia activities drain laptop batteries quicker than ever. Save these activities to when your laptop is plugged in.
7. Disconnect external devices such as PC ad-in cards, USB devices and even optical drives. Also use the laptops touchpad instead of an external USB mouse.
8. Turning off various auto-save features in your applications such as Microsoft Office can conserve some CPU cycles and additionally minimize hard drive usage to increase battery run time.
9. If possible run programs off the internal hard drive instead of your laptops CD/DVD drive for it typically consumes less power. Copying programs or music even from the optical disk to the internal hard drive is a quick way to increase battery life.
10. If your laptop is not going to be used for an extended period of time such as a week or more remove the battery from the laptop and store it by itself.
11. If your laptop is very old it may have a nickel-metal hydride battery. If this is the case completely drain and recharge the battery once a month to maximize its capacity to hold a charge.
12. Limit the exposure of your laptop battery to extremely high or low temperatures. Like humans batteries also have a comfortable operating temperature.
13. Fully charge and discharge a new laptop battery pack before use especially if the battery pack is the older style nickel-metal hydride type battery.
14. If your laptop is always plugged into a wall outlet or docking station it is better to run the laptop without the battery installed for it is not necessary to leave the battery in a constant state of charging. Better to save your battery for when you need it, such as when you are actually mobile.
15. Defragging your computer before you go mobile can increase your laptop battery life run time. Your hard drive will operate more efficiently, thus reducing battery demands. Just make sure you don't defrag when you are running on the battery.
16. Unplugging external devices such as an Ipod, cell phone, mouse, etc. will increase battery run time.
17. Upgrading your systems memory can in some cases increase laptop battery life run time. If your laptop is constantly running out of physical (RAM) memory it will have to utilize the swap file which resides on the hard disk. If your system is running efficiently however (i.e. you do not receive virtual memory notifications) with the amount of memory you currently have, then increasing the memory in this case may actually reduce battery life since each memory module requires electricity to run.
18. Limit your usage of the CD/DVD drive for optical drives consume a ton of laptop battery life. If possible copy your music tracks or even movies to your local hard drive. We like to turn our disks into ISO/Virtual disk files and run them using a virtual drive emulator such as Daemon Tools.
19. Use hibernate over standby, standby still puts drain on your laptop's battery where hibernate puts your computer into an off state.
20. Make sure your laptop running cool for they operate more efficiently when running at a comfortable operating temperature. If your laptop is used often and there is noticeable dust build up in the laptops vents, you should from time to time clean your laptop out with compressed air. Another great way to keep your laptop cool, especially in hot environments, is to use a cooler podium such as the Cooler master cool pad.
21. Tweak your Power Options. Set your screen and hard drive to go off after a few minutes, and additionally make sure your system is set to go into standby and/or hibernate. If you don't mind a potential performance hit, setting your laptop to run in "max battery" mode will run your laptops processors at its minimum operating frequency giving you a nice increase in run time.
22. Limit heavy tasks such as gaming or other CPU intensive tasks like encoding music or videos. Also try if possible to simply limit your multitasking by working with one program at a time. Additionally keep to basic activities such as email and word processing for they consume little CPU cycles to run thus putting less drain on your laptops battery.

Laptop Battery Life

By Battery for Discount | August 24, 2011


www.batteryfordiscount.com


There has been a group of chat recently about laptop battery life. Battery is a consumable electronic product with limited life, but correct use, proper charging and discharging as well as good storage would significantly prolong the laptop battery life. Your laptop battery, you observe, starts losing capacity as soon as you drive it off the lot, and after a year or two you might need to get a new battery just to get an hour or two away from an outlet.


So, what steps can you take to make the battery extended as possible? I’m not talking about optimizing the runtime on a single charge. I am talking about getting as much as possible from a battery before you have to replace it just to get a reasonable runtime out of each charge. Here are a few things you can get the most out of your laptop battery:


1. Keep your laptop battery cool. Batteries humiliate more quickly when they’re hot. That means you should keep vents clear — don’t put your laptop on a feathery pillow or a cushioned surface that will cover vents and catch heat.


2. Don’t pack your laptop away in a bag or other enclosed space when the battery is still warm, trapping the heat. A battery that’s frequently hot to the touch will lose life a lot faster than a battery that isn’t constantly being stressed. Worst of all: If your laptop crashes or refuses to shut off properly, the battery can get really hot when packed away in your bag. Check it to make sure it hasn’t gotten dangerously hot while stowed away over the weekend.


3. Don’t charge your laptop continually. If you only occasionally take your laptop away from a power outlet, but leave it plugged in to charge 24/7, you’re leaving your laptop in a state of perpetual charge at the 100% point — and that is bad for the battery’s long-time health.


Right Ways to Charge a Laptop Battery for the first time:


When charging the battery for the first time your computer with rechargeable batteries. Simply remove the battery from the computer and repeat the charging procedure.
It is necessary to discharge the battery to 0% before recharging it the first time when you use the battery. If you discharge a new battery till the computer goes to hibernation before recharging, the internal microprocessor of the battery can calculate the capacity more accurately.
Upon initial use (or after a prolonged storage period) the battery may require three to four charge/discharge cycles before achieving maximum capacity. The charging process should last at least around 14 hours.
Do a full cycle (charge and discharge) under protection circuit control during a certain period of time to re-modify battery capacity calculation, but it won’t enhance the actual capacity of the battery.


4. If you tend to use your laptop mainly at your desk, exercise your laptop battery by running it down and recharging it once or (even better) twice a month.


5. Alternately, you might want to actually remove the laptop battery if you’re using the laptop at your desk for long time. If you do remove it, don’t store it in a fully charged or depleted state. It’s best to store it in the middle — between 40 and 50 percent of full charge A charged battery will eventually lose its charge if unused. It may therefore be necessary to recharge the battery after a certain storage period. Surely it would be great if you can use the battery once in a month to ensure good storage status.


Calibrating Your Computer's Battery For Best Performance


The battery has an internal microprocessor that provides an approximation of the amount of force in the battery as it charges and discharges. The battery needs to be recalibrated from time to time to keep the onscreen battery time and percent display accurate. You should perform this procedure when you first use your computer and then every few months subsequently.


1. Plug the power adapter in and fully charge your computer's battery until the battery indicator lights turn off and the adapter plug light goes from amber to green, which indicates that the battery is fully charged.


2. Disconnect the power adapter and use your laptop. When your battery gets low, you will see the low battery warning dialog on the screen. Continue to use your computer until it goes to sleep. At that point the battery has been adequately drained for calibration.


3. Connect the power adapter and leave it connected until the battery is fully charged again.
You have to fully charge and then discharge your battery only once to calibrate it. After that, you can connect and disconnect the power adapter when the battery is at any charge level


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More Tips for Longer-Lasting Laptop Batteries

More Tips for Longer-Lasting Laptop Batteries
By Dave Johnson | August 4, 2011

http://www.bnet.com/blog/businesstips/more-tips-for-longer-lasting-laptop-batteries/12075

Hardware budgets are feeling the pinch of our tepid economy, and many companies are making employees use their laptops longer. If you are starting to tell your folks to keep plugging along with their laptops for four or five years instead of just three, you might be running into an unexpected expense: dead laptop batteries.
Well, to be fair, your laptop’s batteries probably aren’t completely dead. But since Lithium Ion batteries tend to lose about 20% of their capacity each year, a typical three-year-old laptop might only get about an hour or so on a charge, which might not even get your folks through an entire meeting. Here are four simple tips to forestall the day that you need to replace those batteries:

Keep it cool. Heat is the primary killer of batteries. Tell your employees to be careful not to let their laptops overheat. One common way that happens is packing a running laptop into a backpack or briefcase. If the laptop fails to go to sleep (and let’s face it — sleep glitches are common), then the laptop can get crazy hot in an enclosed space. You can almost smell the loss of battery longevity.

Recondition your battery regularly. Most laptop manufacturers (except Apple) don’t generally tell you about this, but a simple process known as reconditioning (or occasionally, recalibrating) can breathe new life into your laptop battery and add capacity back. To do that, turn off your screen saver and any other power management tools which put your PC to sleep. Fully charge the laptop, and then let it run all the way down — right until it powers down due to lack of juice. Then charge it back up again and restore your power management stuff. Do this every few months (such as three times a year).

Remove it when you’re not using it. When you leave your laptop plugged in at your desk all day every day, the battery never gets a chance to discharge and recharge — which is critical to its long-term health. Thankfully, there’s a simple solution: Remove the battery. As long as your laptop is connected to AC power, the battery isn’t necessary; it’ll run without it. Just remember to pop it back in before you take your laptop on the go.

Start with a super-sized battery. When you purchase your next round of laptops, upgrade to the extended-life battery. Not only will it give you significantly longer runtime to start with — great for road warriors and anyone else who works away from the office a lot — but the inevitable loss of battery life will have a less pronounced effect. The added cost of the larger batteries is worth the investment, because they end up lasting significantly longer.