How To Extend Your Laptop's Battery Life

Among the common problems associated with your laptop is your laptop battery life which according to experts is a problem that has more to do with its design rather than concrete component failure. What usually happens when the battery is not fully drained after every full charging is it will encounter complicated battery life memory confusion. That is, it will take its previous power level as its new maximum and charge itself until that particular level only.

Nickel Metal Hydride Battery may even have individual cells reversing their polarity as compared to Nickel Cadmium, which are standard models that are somewhat better. But either way, battery type is not an important factor especially when the problem is a flawed software control or a poorly designed charging circuitry. Laptop batteries all have a certain amount of low voltage cells that are connected in series to make the necessary operating voltages.

Some older notebooks require you to cycle the battery frequently to extend laptop battery life. This means utilizing AC power from the time it takes the exhausted battery to be fully charged. With the newer models, if you want to avoid a laptop battery problem, you'll need to charge the batteries completely at least once a week. Sometimes you do not even have to charge them fully as long as the laptop gets run on battery for a sufficient amount of time.

However if you observe that your battery runs down too quickly, here are a few tips on how to extend laptop battery life.

1. You should first check if the aggressive power saving mode in your software has been enabled. You can access this through the manufacturer’s icon or the control panel. With this mode enabled, your laptop will be able to slow down its CPU, spin down the hard drive when unused and deem the screen to save on power.

2. You can also set the level alarm for the estimated battery life of your laptop. You can experiment on lower levels like between 3% and 5% that still gives you enough time to save your work before shut down.

3. Software settings in your laptop are set with a number of features optimized for different functions. For most parts they are intended for computing tasks rather than actually extending the battery life. So if you are watching DVD, the settings make sure that you will not get any interruptions like the video output glint off during play mode or the hard drive spinning down.

4. What the settings would most likely sacrifice for battery reservation is to adjust on LCD brightness or adjust the cooling method. But you can also adjust LCD brightness manually by using your laptop keys so it should not bother you if you get the settings wrong in the profiles.

5. When you are in the aggressive battery saver mode, you will expect the LCD to come on and off which can save extra power but if you keep on spinning the hard drive to hi and low all the time, you might be wasting more power than what the setting actually saves.

6. So if you are going to be on hibernate or standby mode, it is better to stay in the mode and maximize the time in doing other things before going back to active.

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