10 Tips To Make Your Laptop Battery Last Longer

Mobile computing is continuously getting better with best performance, smarter processors, light weight and handy designs, but as we all know, the main power of the mobile computing device (weather it is laptop, mobile, PDA or e-book reader) resides in it’s battery capacity. So here I have quickly listed few tips to help you make your laptop battery last for longer time.

1. Keep your laptop hard disk clean and free.Keeping your laptop hard disk drive conjunction free (regular de-fragmentation) helps your laptop to manage files faster and easier giving improved performance in less time and at less power consumption also.

2. Stop background process and scheduled tasks. It may drain your lappy battery.Some programs always keep running in background. For example, chat programs like yahoo messenger and gtalk gets loaded when your laptop is first booted and than keeps using system resources in background. It is recommended to close these and any applications or programs that you are not using at the time.

3. Disable external device when not in use.Here I mean by external device is built in or external Bluetooth / wi-fi card. USB drives, USB mouse or nay other device that is not the integrated part of the laptop system should be disabled as soon as you stop using them.

4. Lower the screen brightness.Screen brightness consumes more power. Brighter screen will consume more battery than lighter screen. So lower down the brightness up to you can read the screen or turn of the screen when leaving your laptop untouched for few minutes or not using the screen (like while listening to songs only).

5. Turnoff Sounds.Although, sound card is integrated device, it functions similar to brightness of the screen when talking about power consumption. Hence when not in use, I recommend to mute the sound or play music at the lowest possible volume.

6. Empty CD / DVD drive.Keep your disk drives empty when you don’t need to used disks. Don’t keep your CDs or DVDs inside the drive when not in use.

7. Don’t give load on your battery.Some tasks like playing video games, watching movies and burning disks will drain your laptop’s battery, so I strongly recommend doing these tasks only when your laptop is on AC Power. It will keep your battery more healthy and last longer.

8. Improve your RAM capacity.More RAM in laptop will reduce load on virtual memory which again resides in power hungry hard drives. So having more RAM than required is recommended to save on your battery power.

9. Keep your laptop cool and dry.Temperature is silent killer of the battery. Using your laptop in cool environment not only save your power consumption but will also keep your battery healthy for long life.

10. Love your laptop.The more you will love it, the more wonderful it will work for you. Let me tell you that battery is not made to power the laptop but it is made for giving mobility to you. Means you should only use it when you are away from AC power point or charger point. And while you are using on battery, you should keep that in mind and use accordingly (means not wasting time and battery doing un-necessary tasks).

I know, there are few more tips like hibernating and using build in power saving schemes, but I am stopping here because I think its enough for now.

What is your tip?

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