Laptop Battery Maintenance and Important Tips

Ways to Extend Your Laptop Battery Life

1. Turn down the brightness of your monitor

Using your function key (Fn), and the corresponding key to lower the resolution and the brightness on your screen as low as you can will save power. Disable any screen savers as these consume power and it is not necessary to have a screen saver while on battery power.

2. Cut down external devices

USB devices (including your mouse) & WiFi drain down your laptop battery. Remove or shut them down when not in use. It goes without saying that charging other devices (like your iPod) with your laptop when on battery is a surefire way of quickly wiping out the charge on your laptop battery.

3. Cut down on programs running in the background

Itunes, Desktop Search, etc. All these add to the CPU load and cut down battery life. Shut down everything that isn’t crucial when you’re on battery.

4. Lay Off the Multimedia

A little in-flight music is nice while you construct that PowerPoint presentation, but streaming music from your hard drive (or playing a CD) means the disk (or disc) is always spinning.

Important Tips for Maintenance of Laptop Batteries

1. Laptop Battery for the First Use

Your new laptop battery comes in a discharged condition and must be charged before use (refer to your computer manual for charging instructions). Upon initial use (or after a prolonged storage period) the battery may require three to four charge/discharge cycles before achieving maximum capacity.

2. Storage of Laptop Battery

A charged battery will eventually lose its charge if unused. It may therefore be necessary to recharge the battery after a storage period.

3. Keep the Battery Contacts Clean

Clean your battery’s metal contacts every couple of months with a cloth moistened with rubbing alcohol. This keeps the transfer of power from your battery more efficient.

4. Don't Leave Your Battery in Sunlight

Batteries are sensitive and exposing them to extreme temperatures can cause major damage. Not only can it completely ruin them but it will also suck the life out of them. Avoid placing your laptop in direct sunlight.

Tips to Maximize Laptop Battery Performance

1. Purge your battery

Purging is where you disconnect the AC power completely, and stop the laptop's sleep or hibernation feature from being initiated. Allow the laptop to discharge the battery until it powers itself off due to lack of power. Reconnect the AC power supply, but do not power the laptop up, and allow the battery to regain a charge for the next 24 hours. If you have NiCad batteries, perform this once a month, and for NiMH every three months.

2. Add More RAM

This will allow you to process more with the memory your laptop has, rather than relying on virtual memory. Virtual memory results in hard drive use, and is much less power efficient. Note that adding more RAM will consume more energy, so this is most applicable if you do need to run memory intensive programs which actually require heavy usage of virtual memory.