When we say we want to “extend the life of a laptop battery” this could me a couple different things: It could mean you want to make the charge last longer, so if you’re out of the office the charge will get you through until you’re able to plug in again. Or, extending the life of your battery could mean you want to make the battery last as along as you can before you need to physically replace it. Both are directly determined by how you use your laptop. With a little conscious effort, you can utilize tactics that will keep your laptop running happily for years to come.
Increase Laptop Battery Time
You can increase the time between charges by doing some routine maintenance and changing a few settings.
1. To begin, get in the habit of defragging your hard drive every couple of months. This reduces the amount of work your hard drive needs to do to access data on the drive. Less hard drive movement means less heat and less power drain.
2. Next, remove any DVDs from your optical drive. A drive will spin if there is a disk in it, so make sure you do not have any disks in the drive.
3. Turn off Wifi or Bluetooth if you’re not using it. These are usually on by default.
4. Unplug any external USB devices.
5. Reduce the brightness of the screen. This can be done using shortcut keys
6. Hibernate your laptop rather than using standby mode. Hibernating the laptop saves the system current state and shuts the computer down, saving power.
7. Kill unnecessary programs. Got to start and in the run box, type msconfig and hit ok. Under the start-up tab, uncheck any programs you know do not need to load each time your computer boots up. The less programs you run in the background, the longer your charge will last.
Increase The Lifespan Of Your Laptop Battery
Your laptop battery will usually last between two and three years. These tips will help ensure you do not unintentionally reduce the lifespan of your laptop, and may even help you extend its lifespan.
1. Do not frequently completely discharge the battery. Continuously running the battery down to noting causes unnecessary strain on the battery and may reduce its life.
2. Completely discharge the battery once a month. While Lithium-ion batteries don’t suffer from past battery memory issues, it doesn’t hurt to do a controlled drain once a month.
3. Keep the laptop and battery cool. Heat is a battery killer. Do not leave the laptop in a car or exposed to direct sunlight for an extended period of time.
4. If your laptop will run without the battery installed, remove it when you know your laptop will be plugged into direct power for a long period of time.
5. Don’t buy a backup battery. You can buy a backup if you think you’ll need it, but be wary of keeping a battery on the shelf while you wait for the original to die. Ideally, you’ll want to buy a battery that was recently manufactured. If you do have a spare, consider rotating it in with the original so they both have a chance to be used. When not in use, store the batteries in a cool, dry place.
Batteries only last an average of two years, but performing these steps might improve that. You will eventually need to replace the pack when performance drops.
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