Extend Life of Laptop Battery

Here is another article on laptop maintenance. I will try to write more such articles in the coming days too.So normally laptop batteries have lifetime of 2-3 years and after that they start showing signs of aging and you may have to change them. A 9 cell battery which gives backup of 4-5 hours don’t come cheap so instead of looking to have new set of batteries every few years, you may look to follow these simple steps to extend the life of laptop battery.

1. Always keep the battery full charged and avoid using battery support if you can use direct power line
2. At least once or twice a month, discharge the battery completely (as much as possible before the System goes off) and then charge it full if you are using NiMH battery.
3. Recharge the battery after a long period of inactivity.
4. Don’t leave the fully charged battery dormant for a long.
5. Now most laptops are equipped with a switch to dim the screen, try to use it mainly while traveling.
6. If you are at home, try to avoid using CD drives for movies, music etc on battery. Try to use direct power.
7. Try to avoid multi-tasking as much as possible, mainly while traveling. It will give you more backup as CPU requires more power on multi-tasking.
8. Optimize the Power Options from control panel that suits you best.
9. If your laptop has lower RAM then try to increase it as for having lower RAM often the system requires to access the virtual memory which needs more power than physical RAM.
10. Run defragment of your system regularly as it reduces the pressure on hard disk and saves power.