How to Maximize Your Laptop Battery’s Life

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Many laptop users find themselves constantly looking for power outlets to charge their laptop batteries. Here are some tips for maximizing the battery life of your laptop.

1. Dim your screen

Most laptops give you the option of dimming your screen. To ensure long battery life, reduce the brightness of the screen to the lowest possible level which you can work with.

2. Defragment regularly

If your hard drive works very fast and efficiently, there will not be much demand on your laptop battery. It is therefore important to enhance the efficiency of your laptop by defragmenting it as often as possible.

3. Reduce the number of external devices

Things such as WiFi and USB devices (such as the mouse, flash disks, external hard disks, etc.) use up a lot of the laptop battery. You should therefore shut them down or remove them when they are not in use. In addition, your laptop battery is drained when you charge other devices as your laptop is running on the battery.

4. Reduce programs running in the background

Programs which run automatically in the background significantly lower the battery life. When running the laptop on battery, remember to shut down all the programs which are not important.

5. Clean the battery contacts regularly

Your battery’s metal contacts need to be cleaned as often as possible. This can be done by wiping them with rubbing alcohol. Regular cleaning of the metal contacts ensures more efficient transfer of power from the battery.

6. Increase the RAM

Increasing the RAM will enable you to use up more of the laptop’s memory, instead of depending on virtual memory. The disadvantage of virtual memory is that it less power efficient and uses much of the hard drive. However, you need to note that increasing the RAM will result in more energy consumption. Therefore, this should only be done when you need to run programs which are memory-intensive.

7. Take care of the battery

Batteries work best when used regularly. Avoid leaving a charged battery unused for a long time. Once charged, make sure you use the laptop battery not less than twice in a month. In addition, you should not allow the battery to run out of charge completely.

8. Avoid multitasking

When running on battery, it is advisable to do one thing at a time. Instead of allowing email to run in the background, working on a Word document and listening to online radio, focus on one thing only. Multitasking will only end up draining your batteries very fast.

9. Keep the temperatures down

Your laptop works better when it is cooler. Use a keyboard cleaner or cloth to clean out your air vents as often as possible. In addition, avoid placing it on the laps for a long time since this blocks the air vents.

10. Don’t standby, hibernate

Putting a laptop in standby enables you to resume immediately where you left off. Though it does save some power, it doesn’t save as much as the hibernate function. Placing your laptop in hibernate mode shuts it down completely, while saving your current tasks.

11. Don’t demand too much from your laptop

The more you demand, the faster your battery will be drained. Passive tasks like word processing and checking email don’t use as much power as playing a DVD or gaming. Therefore, before undertaking any task, make sure your priorities are right.

12. Turn off the autosave feature

MS-Excel’s and Word’s autosave features are useful for saving your information at regular intervals. However, this feature makes your hard drive work very hard, thus using up much power. It is therefore advisable to turn off this function as often as possible.

13. Buy an efficient laptop

Nowadays, laptop manufacturers are producing more efficient laptops. You could therefore consider replacing your aging laptop with a newer, more efficient model.

Tags: external hard disks, flash disks, laptop batteries

Category: Laptops