Saturday, October 17, 2009

Extending the Life of Your Laptop Battery


By Nancy Walker

When you are out and about using your laptop without the benefit a nearby electrical outlet, getting as much as you can out of the life of your battery becomes critical. The problem is that the majority of laptop batteries last no more than around two hours. The reason for this is that most of the programs loaded on a modern laptop silently suck the life out of a battery. You may not be aware of this, but those programs you run are powered by your laptop's batteries. A good way of stopping the power drain on your batteries is to avoid the simultaneous usage of multiple applications when your computer isn't plugged into an outlet. The drain rate of your batteries can be reduced in a number of different ways. There is an easy process you can use to get additional time out of your laptop's batteries.

The majority of today's laptops are equipped with a battery that lasts up to several hours. If used correctly, the battery in your laptop could go on for several years. However, the means by which it keeps and drains power will get worse towards the end of its life cycle. In order to extend battery life without a technician's assistance, there are several steps you could enforce by yourself.

Dimming your laptop's screen would be a very easy step you could take to prolong its battery life. This can be accomplished through fiddling with your monitor's brightness levels by using the laptop's secondary function keys. All you do is press the function key and hold "F', which has a sun and arrow icon on it. An alternate approach for modifying your laptop's brightness levels would be using the power saving settings. Laptops that have Windows Vista will have that window on other laptop settings you could allow you to use the computer at longer intervals. In addition to other power saving settings, you could use the sleep and power off settings.

Graphically and audibly dense applications also require large amounts of battery power to operate. If you are using more than one or two of these applications at once, your energy will drain much more readily than you may think. Wireless adapters are additional battery energy drainers. Such adapters continuously sap energy as they try to find wireless signals that it can connect to, even if you know there aren't any around. So, if you do not require Internet connectivity or if you know you won't be able to find a network, simply shut the adapter off.

Be certain that any removable storage drives you have are empty. The DVD you watched the other night and absolutely hated may still be in your DVD/CD drive, forgotten. Open the drive and remove the disc, because, even though it's not currently running, it's still draining the power from your laptop batteries. Other power vampires include plugged in USB devices, such as thumb drives. When you are done with your USB devices, you can save a lot of the drain on your power supply by ejecting them immediately.

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