Saturday, June 12, 2010

Laptop Battery Life - Maximize It

Laptop batteries are very expensive to replace, and once they die, if you don't have an extra battery, you can't go anywhere without your power adapter and obviously need somewhere to plug it in.

When operating your laptop on battery power, run the battery down until the computer warns you it going dead. Then plug in the laptop until the battery is fully charged. If you keep your laptop mainly in the same place, keep it hooked up to AC power. There's no reason to run on the battery if it's not necessary. If the battery is fully charged and you disconnect it to take it to another room for a few minutes, do not hook it back up to the AC power, let the battery run down. Why you ask?

Batteries have memory, if they constantly use only a portion of their power, they forget they have more to offer. Sounds funny, but that's how they work. They claim the newer high end batteries do not have memory, but honestly I haven't had any experience with them so I cannot verify that for sure. I can say that my iPhone after a year and a half, still has excellent battery power even though I am guilty of charging it when it's not even nearly dead.

Macbook batteries go 300+ cycles before they go bad, a cycle is full charge to dead. I treat my cycles like gold, my Macbook pro is 3 months old and I have only used 7 cycles and follow the rule of fully charged to fully dead.

If you are experiencing low battery life and do have some of the bad habits that I mentioned above, there is a remedy. Fully charge your battery and run it down completely dead (until the laptop turns off), do this 3 times and it should give your battery some more life, but don't expect it to be like new. This applies to all batteries, laptops, mobile phones, tools, etc.

Conserve battery energy by adjusting your power settings to put the display and hard disk to sleep after 5 minutes of not being used. Never use your laptop in a very hot environment, if you do, buy a fan tray for it to rest on.

Recommend : HP Pavilion DV4-2160US

0 comments:

Post a Comment