Best practices to increase Toshiba satellite a205 laptop battery life
Toshiba Satellite A205 laptop has 802.11n support, Harman Kardon speakers, and a Labelflash optical drive; a long, single hinge gives the laptop a sturdy feel. Blue LED lights on the front edge give you updates about battery status and hard drive activity, ran for 2 hours, 8 minutes on our DVD battery drain test, using the included six-cell battery.
Laptop battery life is one of the most precious factors of our mobile IT world. Yet, many business laptops struggle to deliver more than three hours when performing even average tasks. This is a big concern, whether you’re an IT manager in charge of a mobile workforce or on the road yourself.
A fast draining battery kills your efficiency in places with no electrical outlet in sight. It forces you to waste money on spare laptop batteries that you need to schlepp around in your bag.
Why Notebooks Run Out of Juice Sooner Than Expected
According to Microsoft’s own telemetry data, almost 50% of a laptop’s power goes to the LCD screen. Bigger and brighter panels require more power input, thus quickly draining Toshiba satellite a205 battery life fast. It’s also the reason you’ll experience ridiculously low battery life on these huge 17” or even 18.4” laptops — in many cases barely topping the two hour mark.
The rest of the energy output is almost equally divided by the CPU, hard disk, graphics card, network card, and chipset. Obviously, on a more powerful computer, the CPU/GPU combination takes up a bigger chunk of the power equation.
Whether as an IT administrator or user, it is your goal to keep the power consumption of all hardware components to a minimum. This is done by restricting performance levels, by forcing the computer to enter lower power states sooner, and, most often, by disabling (currently) unneeded hardware components.
Optimize Windows 7’s power plans
Switching between Windows’s built-in power plans is a well-known and nice first step to save battery life. Depending on the laptop’s hardware and battery, going from “High Performance” to “Energy saver” boosts the total uptime almost instantly.
As readers of BattAussie.com, switching between power plans won’t be a big revelation; you do that already, correct? What you probably didn’t know is that “power saver” is a compromise. I’d almost go a bit further and call it a little misleading. While that software utility takes every possible step to power down unused USB devices, network cards, the hard disk, and the graphics bus, it still lets the processor clock to its maximum speed and eat up all the power it needs.
Newer drivers may also consume more power. I’ve seen that happen with a newer graphics driver that (due to a bug) prevented the GPU from clocking down accordingly, thus sucking up Toshiba Pa3534u-1bas Battery life much quicker.
My advice: Make sure to include a series of battery life benchmarks when evaluating drivers before rolling them out in your IT infrastructure.
Check the Status of Your Toshiba Laptop Battery and Keep it Healthy
Windows 7 has a hidden — yet very neat — tool to measure the energy efficiency of your system. It shows if your current power plan has settings that need to be tweaked, what processes are causing high amounts of CPU usage (see #3), and which drivers put an unusual strain on your battery. It also shows you the current health of your lithium ion battery, which is extremely important to observe over time, especially after many hundred times of charging and discharging the battery.
In order for Lithium-Ion batteries to stay healthy for longer periods of time, you need to treat them carefully. Here’s some final bit of advice:
- Never discharge lithium-ion batteries completely (<0% battery life). In some cases this may damage the battery beyond repair. Allow partial charges and discharges! Lithium-Ion batteries don’t suffer from the “memory effect” of much older laptop batteries.
- Avoid extreme heat or cold. Try keeping them at room temperature!
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