How to Save Laptop Battery Power? Give you long battery life

You've got a five-hour flight from Los Angeles to New York City, and one battery in your laptop. You've got work to do, DVDs to watch, and games to play. How are you going to get that battery to last?

Most people are aware of the basic laptop battery-saving techniques such as adjusting the LCD brightness to the lowest level possible, or closing all unused applications especially if they are media players. Anyone who practices battery frugality knows these and probably even more. But what many people do not know is that your laptop's specifications also contribute to the battery's inevitable battery loss. If you knew these rare facts, coupled with the battery-saving techniques you already know, you would be able to save a great deal of your laptop battery life the next time you travel. Below are thesome relatively unknown energy-saving tips for your laptop.

Dimming Your Screen

Your screen and hard drive use up more digital camera batteries power than any other parts of your computer. You can dim down your screen to a point where your eyes still feel comfortable but you also save energy. On most laptops, you first dim the screen by holding down the "Fn" key (go ahead and find it because you may never have used it before). Then you look for a key on your laptop that either has a picture of a sun or a half-moon. (On my Sony Vaio that key happens to be F5.) If you find it, go ahead and hit it while still holding down the Fn key. A brightness adjustment box should show up on your screen. If you can't find a key with a sun or half-moon on it, try hitting your various arrow keys while holding down Fn, to see if that works.

Defragging regularly

The process of defragmentation is too lengthy to explain and a very technical one at that. But to give you a brief explanation, defragmentation is basically done to your computer's disk drive to increase its speed and functionality. This means that the faster your hard drive does its work, there would be significantly less demand on energy. That said, it is important that you defrag your disk drive regularly in order to make your hard drive as efficient as possible.

Turning Off Your Screen Altogether

If dimming your screen is good for saving battery life, turning it off when you're not using it is even better. To turn off your screen, we're going to have to go into some settings in the Control Panel. You'll soon see these settings are not only good for turning off screens; they perform a whole host of sony vgp-bps13 laptop battery saving functions.

Click on Start, then on Control Panel. If your Control Panel is shown in the "Category View", click first on Performance and Maintenance, then on Power Options. If your Control Panel is in Classic View, simply click on the Power Options icon. Next click on the Power Schemes Tab. Underneath where it says Running on Batteries and across from where it says Turn Off Monitor, choose how quickly you'd like your monitor to shut off when you're not actively using it.

That Power Options Properties box we just opened brings us to a whole host of other enticing options we can employ on our cross-country flight!

Increase RAM to its fullest

Experienced laptop users notice that laptops with 2GB of RAM works significantly longer that a laptop with 1GB of RAM. Research has shown that laptops with more RAM allow you to process more with the memory the laptop has, rather than using virtual memory. Relying on virtual memory makes the hard drive use up huge amounts of energy, thereby quickly reducing battery power.

Choosing a Power Scheme

Windows XP offers two Power Schemes appropriate for laptops on the go. These are Portable/Laptop and Max hp dv6000 battery. They can both be chosen in the Power Schemes tab of the Power Options Properties box. Both power schemes conserve battery power. But Portable laptop adjusts what it conserves to the amount of power you need at the time, while Max Battery is much less flexible. It keeps your computer at a very low constant power rate no matter what you may be doing. So if you are planning on watching a DVD on that flight, which uses a lot of battery power, I don't recommend using the Max Battery power scheme. It might not give you enough power.

Each power scheme also has its own settings for when the monitor and hard disks should be turned off. Remember that both are huge energy hogs, and that both the monitor and hard disk remain on longer under Portable/Laptop than they do under Max Battery.

The power scheme you choose also determines how long the computer will wait to go into Standby mode or Hibernate after remaining idle. Standby conserves energy because it turns off your hard disk and monitor. However, whatever you were working on at the time stays in memory (RAM) instead of being saved safely to your hard drive. The upside of Standby, though, is that when you press any key your computer will come out of the mode rather quickly.

Hibernation saves even more energy because it saves your work to the hard drive and then shuts your computer down almost all the way. Inherently, of course, this means it takes the computer longer to wake up to its normal state, but when everything does come back on, it looks the same as before. To switch your hp touchsmart tx2 battery computer to Standby mode manually, click on Start, then on Turn off Computer, then on Standby. To make your computer Hibernate manually, click on Start and Turn off Computer again, but this time hold down the Shift key down afterward. The Standby key switches to "Hibernate". Click it and your computer will go into Hibernation mode.

Avoid the CD/DVD drive

CD/DVD drives consume so much power when in use. They spin, taking too much battery power. And they still spin even when they're not actively used. You can prevent this by using your computer's hard drive rather than the CD/DVD drive. Simply copy the file from the CD and paste it on your hard drive. This may take a while depending on the size of the file, but you would rather wait a few minutes and be able to save a significant amount of battery life than suffer the consequences of using the energy-draining CD/DVD drive, wouldn't you?

Creating Your Own Profiles

Maybe you don't like the two power saving choices Windows gives you. Maybe you want to create custom ones to suit your own needs. You can do that! I created one for "Long Plane Rides". I adjusted the settings in the Power Options Properties box. For instance, I indicated I wanted my monitor to turn off after only 2 minutes of idle time, and my hard disks after 3 minutes. Then I clicked on Save As, named my profile, and clicked OK. Now maybe the battery will last even longer on the flight.

Let's go through some other choices in the Power Options Properties box. Under the Alarm tab, you can check boxes to either be alerted when your battery is low and/or when your battery is critical. You can even use the slider to make your own determination of just what is low and what is critical. Then you can click on Alarm Action to tell your computer to, for instance, sound an alarm or go into Standby mode when those moments are reached.

Under the Advanced tab, you can choose what you want your inspiron 1525 Battery laptop to do when you close the lid. You can choose it to go into Standby mode, Hibernation, or even do nothing if you wish. You can also choose what you'd like the computer to do when you hit the power button.

If you're interested in using your laptop's Hibernation feature you should check the box under the Hibernation tab that says Enable Hibernation.

Keep battery contacts clean

Just as a dirty car engine produces much poorer fuel-burning efficiency, dirty laptop battery contacts provide less power and a quicker lifespan for your laptop. You need to keep the transfer of power from your battery to the laptop more efficient. You can do this by making sure to clean your battery's metal contacts at least every two months with a cloth moistened with just the right amount of rubbing alcohol.

Turn Off Wireless Network Card

Your wireless card can also be a drain on your battery's resources, so disable it if you don't need it. (You don't need it obviously on a plane, for instance.) If your laptop has a wireless card, simply take it out. If your laptop has wireless built-in, you can disable it in Windows XP by clicking on Start and going to your Control Panel. In Category View, click on Network and Internet Connections, then Network Connections. In Classic View, simply click on Network Connections. Once you're there, right click on the wireless connection you're using, and click on Disable. You can also disable your wireless network card through the Device Manager. Right click on My Computer and left click on Properties. Click on the ibm thinkpad t41 battery Hardware tab and then the Device Manager button. Next, click on the small black cross next to where it says Network Adapters. Locate your wireless network adapter, right click on it, and left click on Disable.

You can also left click on Properties instead (after you right click on your network adapter), click on the Power Management tab, and check the box that says "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power".

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