Surefire ways to maximize laptop battery run time
Notebook PC lets you get down to business wherever you happen to be—airport lounge, coffee shop, your home office. It’s the key to your competitive edge. To avoid the heartache of laptop battery power run out, today BattAussie laptop battery experts share following surefire tips for maximizing your laptop battery life.
1. Adjust laptop screen brightness
Modern displays with LED backlights are a major improvement over the CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent tube) backlit displays of yesteryear, in terms of both picture quality and power efficiency. Still, a laptop’s display claims a significant percentage of the power that the system consumes. Keeping the screen backlight low can increase your laptop’s run time noticeably. You should also take care in choosing where you work: A low backlight setting will be far more comfortable in a café with soft lighting than in a brightly lit room.
2. Disable intensive background apps
Errant apps aside, applications that make intensive use of the processor or network should remain closed when your laptop isn’t plugged in. Disabling automatic Windows Update functions outright is too draconian, but periodically checking on your network usage for unexplained spikes will allow you to identify and stop large file transfers before they gobble up precious minutes of HP Elitebook 8530w Laptop Battery life.
3. Disable unneeded devices
Start by disabling unneeded wireless capabilities, such as built-in data modems and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios could squeeze out a few more minutes of battery power.
The optical-disc drive is another power guzzler that can drain batteries fast, so don’t leave a DVD or Blu-ray disc in the drive if you don’t need it. Finally, many laptops these days come with backlit keyboards; these are great when you’re in a dark environment, but you can save precious power by doing without the feature when your laptop is running on battery power.
4. Plug in laptop ac adapter whenever possible
Keeping your laptop fully charged makes it far more likely that you will always have the juice you need to complete your work. Purchase at least one extra Dell Studio 1747 Laptop AC Adapter, so you’ll always have one in your office and one in your laptop bag for travel. If you work at home frequently, consider buying a third laptop power adapter to leave there. A common misconception about laptops is that leaving the system plugged into AC power continuously will overcharge or shorten the life of its battery. Given that the lithium battery cells used in modern laptops will either catch fire or explode if overcharged. Lithium ion batteries stop charging once they reach full capacity, and keeping the battery charged reduces wear and tear on the power source, lengthening its useful lifespan.
5. Track down errant apps
One culprit often responsible for draining the notebook battery ahead of its time is the presence of errant software applications that suck up disproportionate processor cycles. Unnecessary utilities running in the background, or an app that is hanging, can also cause this effect. Web browsers are particularly prone to the latter problem, due to the multiple plug-ins, rendering engines, and scripting engines embedded within them.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
[…] Notebook PC lets you get down to business wherever you happen to be—airport lounge, coffee shop, your home office. It’s the key to your competitive edge. To avoid the heartache of laptop battery power run out, today BattAussie laptop battery experts share following surefire tips for maximizing your laptop battery life. 1. Adjust laptop screen brightness Modern … […]