You’ve had to drop a fairly decent chunk of change to purchase a new battery for your laptop.  Want to learn how to keep from having to do this again soon?  We’ve gathered a few tips to prolong the life of your battery.

  1. All of us laptop owners are guilty of this one, which is probably why the battery manufacturers are doing just fine.  Did you know that you’re supposed to pull the battery out when you’re running on a/c power? Laptop manufacturers must hide that little bit of information in the fine print at the back of the manual (who am I kidding – I didn’t read the manual!), because I, for one, had no idea.  Be sure when you remove it to store it in a cool dry place.
  2. Utilize the Power Management Tools on the Control Panel.  By going into the Control Panel and changing things like the amount of time before the laptop hibernates, or turning off the screen saver and other non-essential background operations, you can save your battery for when it counts.
  3. When you do plug it in to charge the battery, be sure you charge it until the battery is at 100%.  Every time you don’t charge to 100%, you lose some of the future power capacity of the battery.  Over time, this will reduce the effectiveness of the battery and will ultimately cause you to be in the same situation you now find yourself in – buying a new battery.
  4. Batteries are like big jugs of water sitting around with the lid off.  If you don’t use up all of the water every once in a while, the water inside starts evaporating and leaving behind yucky stuff that, if you’re not careful, will make that jug unusable after a while.  What you need to do is, every month or so, drain all of the power ot of your battery by unplugging it and turning off all the power saving functions we just recommended (I know, I know…) and let the battery drain down to nothing.  Then, without turning it back on, plug the computer back into the wall and leave it to charge overnight.  Emptying the battery allows it to clear residual memory and that will make it more ready to hold a charge next time.
  5. You may not realize it, but when you do an install, many programs will load in the background on startup to do things like look for automatic updates, then keep running.  While these programs may not be a nuisance when you’re plugged into the wall, when you’re running on stored power they can be a steady drain that you don’t need.  So, when mobile, be sure and right click on the icons in your start bar and turn each of those programs off.  Even turn off our wifi if you’re not surfing!
  6. Finally, laptops and their batteries are much like us – they don’t do well if they get too hot for too long.  So, if you’re enjoying nature while surfing the net, be sure your laptop is in a shady place and, if you’re sweating, then your laptop most certainly isn’t happy, either, and you should probably resume your surfing inside with the air conditioning.

We hope these tips have helped!  Happy Computing!

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Filed under: Battery Information