Posts Tagged ‘Laptop Care’

Extending the Life of Your Laptop Battery

November 11th, 2009

While on the go with your laptop, you will need to do everything you can to prolong your laptop battery’s lifespan. It is a sad fact that the majority of these batteries won’t live for more than a few hours at a time. This is due to the fact that many programs on today’s laptops will drain your battery noiselessly. You may not appreciate this, but the programs you use drain your battery power. Your best approach to prolonging the life of your batteries would be to quit using more than one program at a time while just being on battery power alone. You could use a couple different approaches for lessening the speed of which your batteries drain. So long as you stick to several easy steps, your laptop’s battery can live much longer.

A few hours is usually the maximum time you can power your modern laptop by batteries. If you are careful with the way you use it, you can extend the life of your battery for a couple of years. However, near the end of its lifetime, the way it drains and stores energy declines significantly. You don’t need a computer technician to help you prolong the battery life of your laptop computer; there are some easy steps that you can take by yourself.

Making you screen dimmer is an especially easy way to prolong the battery life of your laptop computer. This is done by using the secondary function keys to adjust the level of screen brightness on your laptop. You just press and hold the function key, while hitting the F key that displays a down arrow and a sun icon. You can also control the brightness of your screen by accessing your settings for saving power. If your laptop’s operating system is Windows Vista, then you have the window on other settings that can be adjusted to extend your battery life. You can also save power by using “sleep” and “power off” settings.

Programs with high graphic content and audio are greedy applications and can drain your batteries quickly. Power drainage from your laptop may be much faster than you thought if you run more than two of these applications simultaneously. If you have a Wi-Fi networking device, be aware that these are greedy power eaters, as well. Although you may not have a network connection, the Wi-Fi device will keep on sucking down power while it is seeking and detecting available networks If you don’t need a network connection and have no plans to connect to the internet, shut the device down, and you will save a lot of power.

Be certain that any removable storage drives you have are empty. The DVD you watched the other night and absolutely hated may still be in your DVD/CD drive, forgotten. Open the drive and remove the disc, because, even though it’s not currently running, it’s still draining the power from your laptop batteries. Other power vampires include plugged in USB devices, such as thumb drives. When you are done with your USB devices, you can save a lot of the drain on your power supply by ejecting them immediately.

Toshiba batteries last a long time, but if your up and you need a Toshiba battery PA3537U 1BRS or PA3588U 1BRS.