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Maintaining Your Computer Battery


It may seem a little extensive to apply eleven tips to simply maintaining your computer battery, but consider this. How many guidelines do you apply to maintaining your car? If you are someone who is on call for work, works from home or uses your laptop computer for school, then isn’t it vital that your laptop be able to work, when you want it to, as long as you need it to?
With that in mind, it seems important that the life of your computer battery be maintained. Even though many batteries come with some type of warranty, users have to take the lead to keep their batteries maintained. The following guidelines will help keep your computer battery running at peak performance, so your laptop can be of service anytime and anywhere you need it.
1. Dim your screen. It seems a small thing, but your monitor can drain your computer battery. Dim it to as low as you can manage to save some computer battery life.
2. Defrag your hard drive regularly. Plug your laptop in and defrag your hard drive to speed up your computer and reduce the demand you put on your computer battery.
3. Reduce your external device use. While the toys and tools we have access to today can simplify our lives, they tend to drain our computer battery. Remove your iPod, WiFi or other USB devices while you are working with your computer battery alone.
4. Cut out the running programs. This includes your iTunes program, Desktop Search or even your screen saver. They drain your computer battery by just being open.
5. Run on your hard drive, not a DVD or CD. While running your laptop from your hard drive can drain the computer battery, it will drain much faster using a CD or DVD drive away from the power source.
6. Add extra RAM. Not only will you get faster processing, but your laptop can rely on the memory it already has and not have to rely on virtual memory, which will benefit your computer battery.
7. One project at a time while on computer battery. Stick to one task while working on computer battery time and your computer battery charge will last that much longer.
8. Keep the battery contacts clean. Clean your computer battery contacts about 4 times a year with a cloth and rubbing alcohol. Computer battery power transfer will be more efficient.
9. Hibernate your computer. In lieu of going into Standby mode, hibernation saves your computer’s state as it us, including the computer battery life before completely shutting it down.
10. Optimize your power options. From your Windows control panel, set your power controls to “max battery” to get the most from your computer battery.
11. Keep it cool. Clean your air vents with a dry cloth or keyboard cleaner to best maintain the temperature of your laptop. Regulating the temperature will allow your laptop to run more efficiently and extend the life of your computer battery.