Ways to Increase Laptop Battery Life

With the rise in laptop buyers its essential for laptop users to make sure they use their laptop batteries to the fullest and make sure they can achieve the highest performance with the available battery. Generally most laptops are claimed to have 4-6 hours of battery life but in real it comes to 50% of the promised backup time because of many factors like heavy laptop usage while on battery backup, running USB Based gadgets, CD/DVD Roms etc and shedding down huge battery life. You also need to make sure about some battery life saving tips because the laptop batteries generally have a life of around 1000 recharge cycles. Here is a list of 19 essential tips which can almost double your laptop battery life and offer you a better laptop experiance.

1. Recharge your laptop computer using the power cord/adapter provided by the laptop dealer and dont use any other local cord because they can decrease the life of your battery.
2. Buy Li-Ion based batteries because they have internal processors which controls the internal temperature to make sure the batteries dont get over heated/explode and are easy to manage.
3. If you dont use your laptop for a continious period its recommended to remove your batteries completely from the laptop and add it back when you plan to use it. This is because laptop batteries have a limited lifetime and its generally 1000 charge cycles after which they stop offering complete backups. Even if its not use the battery drains and thats the reason you should completely remove it and store in a cool place and at a 40% charge rather than 100% charge.
4. Use power management features offered by your laptop which would make the computer to run at lower processor speeds when the power is down and automatically manage the complete system.
5. When you are using your laptop on battery make sure you set your display to lower brightness using the FN key combination. This would help you to use lower battery and get a better backup. The display system takes 50% of your available battery and lower brightness would ensure you more battery life.
6. Settings up Automatic Hibernate feature to make sure the laptop automatically saves all your running documents and applications and hibernates when you are not using the laptop for a given amount of time. A Feature which can save up your battery life when you are not using your laptop for a set specified time after which it automatically hibernates.
7. Stop playing Music/Videos while the laptop is running on a battery because this can drain your batteries quickly and offer you a lower uptime. This is because while you run any of these kind of applications your inbuilt sound speakers would take huge amount of battery and instead you can use earphones to listen to music while running on battery because this needs very less amount of battery.
8. Its recommended to completely make your laptop Mute or Turn off Sound because even though you dont play any music/videos the laptop would make different kinds of sounds when you close/open any applications because of the sound scheme setup in your windows.
9. When you are running your laptop only on batteries avoid running multiple applications because even though your laptop can support huge applications at the same time because of the heavy configuration like processor, RAM etc you need to make sure you close all the applications which are not in use.
10. Wi-Fi should be turned off when not in use because it drains your laptop battery in search of signals and wireless router. You can use the hardware switch available in the laptop’s side to disable your wi-fi or disable it from the Network Connections option available under your control panel.
11. Disable Aero Glass Feature which comes preinstalled in Windows Vista. You need to right click on your desktop > preferances > View Colour > Appearance > Classic Appearance and Windows Basic graphical interface > ok , this way you can get the classic appearance which has less resource using features and helps you use less battery.
12. Avoid Using CD/DVD Drives while running your laptop on batteries because they drain your laptop battery heavily and would lead to lower backup time. These drives spin at high speeds and need good amount of power to complete their process.
13. Defragment your hard disk drive regularly to make sure it processes everything quickly and this in turn leads to lower hard disk spins and less power usage. If you dont defragement your hard disk then the laptop would have slow loading programs and frozen applications.
14. Uninstalling useless softwares and applications which are running in background, because these applications would use your notebook’s resources and drain its battery. Removing them if not necessary would be the best measure.
15. Try to maintain your laptop stay cool with a laptop cooling pad or playing it on a cooler area rather than on your laps or bed because that way it can get heated easily and laptops operate efficiently when they are cooler.
    
16. Run low resource using applications like emails, documenting etc rather than playing games, DVD, running high resource using applications like adobe photoshop, 3Dmax, Visual Basic .net etc because when you run these kind of applications the laptop has to run on high resources and use more battery.
17. Use low graphics mode for display ie by changing your windows display theme to the most simple/classic one. In case of Windows XP you need to go to Display Properties > Theme > Windows Classic > Apply and also disable your screensaver.
18. Disable any connected USB Gadgets like external hard drives, pen drives etc because even though they are not in use, when they are connected they keep using your laptops battery via the USB 2.0 port. Disabling and disconnecting them would increase your laptop’s battery.
19. Clean your battery regularly to make sure its contacts are clean and the battery works more effeciently, you can use a cloth moistened with rubbing alcohol to clean the metal contacts.