10 Ways to Extend Your Laptop’s Battery Life

When traveling, or working from a WiFi hotspot, you want to get the most out of your laptop’s battery charge. Plugging in isn’t always an option and replacement batteries aren’t cheap, so it’s important to know how to get as many charges – and as much mileage between each charge – as possible. Let’s consider 10 ways that you can extend your laptop’s battery life.

1. Turn Down Brightness – Many laptops have a power saver mode that changes settings automatically. You can go even further on one charge by lowering your screen’s brightness to the lowest usable setting.
2. Set Power Mode – As mentioned previously, the power saver mode can save you some precious juice. It can also be adjusted by the user. You can change your power saver settings to optimize your battery charge.
3. Run Lean – The more programs that are in your Start Menu, the more your laptop has to work each time it boots up. You can adjust your start-up menu to only include those programs that are essential to the work you plan to do.
4. Run Cool – Your battery runs more efficiently at lower temperatures. If you plan to be working for an extended period, it may be a good idea to invest in an external cooling device for your laptop.
5. One Thing at a Time – Multitasking is a great time-saver and a natural tendency, but it’s also tough on batteries. Try using one program at a time when battery life is a concern.
6. Run it Out – Older laptops that don’t have the Li-Ion batteries develop memories. That is, they ‘remember’ how long they need to go between charges and after a time will not maintain a charge beyond that duration. These older type batteries need to be fully discharged before recharging.
7. Not for Li-Ions – The newer lithium-ion batteries, on the other hand, should never be allowed to fully discharge. Make sure you maintain some level of charge on yours to keep it in good working order.
8. Hibernate – It doesn’t bring you back to where you left off as does the more often used Standby mode; but since it shuts your computer down completely (while still enabling you to restore your previous session on re-boot), Hibernate mode saves much more power.
9. Defrag your Drive – De-fragmenting your hard drive allows your computer to work more efficiently. It reduces the amount of time and work needed to retrieve stored data, thus saving energy.
10. Memory Serves – The more RAM memory that your laptop has, the less virtual memory it requires to run programs. Virtual memory is a function of the hard drive, which is an energy guzzler.

Taken From Internet Service