5 Tips for Saving Battery Life
Tip 1: Power Down the Display
Do you know one of the most effective ways to conserve
laptop battery life is to lower the brightness of
the screen display? Its been known that lowering one
level of screen brightness will yield up to 10 more
minutes of battery life. You can easily do this by
going to Start > Settings > Control Panel >
Display and clicking the Settings tab. You can also
disable those cool effects like ClearType fonts and
fade effects to reduce the CPU's power consumption.
Tip 2: Turn Off Unused Devices
And here's another tip for you. As you may know, many
modern laptops have a Wi-Fi built in. Unknown to many
people, that Wi-Fi connection is a power guzzler!
Make sure you turn off the Wi-Fi connection using
the external Wi-Fi on-off switch. If your laptop does
not offer such a switch, you should go to the Control
Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager
and disable the infrared transceiver, Ethernet adapter
and Bluetooth radio.
Tip 3: Decrease Hard Drive
Activity
Your laptop hard drive is another power eating culprit.
To save power, you should reduce the frequency with
which your hard disk has to spin. To do this, you
can try defragmenting your hard drive regularly. This
can be done using the Disk Degfragmenter in the Start
> Programs > Accessories > System Tools menu.
You can also optimize the Windows'
paging file - the area of the laptop hard drive that
serves as virtual memory whenever your RAM is full.
Optimizing the paging file size ensures your hard
drive is accessed less frequently when you run out
of system memory. To change it, go to the Control
Panel > System > Advanced > Performance Settings
> Advanced > Virtual Memory Change. Set both
the initial and maximum paging file size to 1.5 times
the capacity of your installed RAM size.
Tip 4: Disable Startup Items
Here's another tip. Disable your unneeded startup
items! I find it very irritating whenever my laptop
boots up and I've to wait like 20 seconds for all
manner of little program bits to load into memory.
You can disable those startup programs. Go to the
associated programs and click on the Options or Preferences
menu to do this. You can also go to the Startup tab
in your Start Menu and clear programs you don't want
to run at boot time.
Tip 5: Condition the Battery
One thing you should remember about laptop batteries.
You need to condition it. When you first buy your
laptop, charge the battery to 100 percent and then
discharge it completely. Next, charge it to 100 percent
again. This is not a pointless exercise - it 'conditions'
the battery and helps it remember exactly how much
electrical charge it can hold. After you do that,
you will never need to completely discharge the battery
again.
Conclusion
I hope this article has shown you some good tips on
conserving laptop battery life. Follow the above tips
so that the next time you're sipping coffee in Starbucks,
you have lots of battery life left in your laptop
for surfing and working. Until next time, happy computing!
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