We were wating for a team of investors to arrive at the meeting desk. "I'm out of juice", said one of the presenters candidly. The comment was remarked upon by several participants with a series of facial expressions and laughter. Everyone of us knew what she meant - battery power in her laptop had drained out, and as if it weren't already enough, she admitted that she was not used to carrying its power adapter. This might have happened of some of us; and many of us do not carry along the power adapter. What should be done in order to avoid such unpleasant surprises? Here are a few tips - tested and tried - and found to prolong your laptop battery-life a bit longer. Much longer, in fact.
- Power down all non-essential components when not in use, such as wireless card, ROM drives, USB devices and external mouse.
- It is not advisable to watch movie in your DVD-ROM while on the road or during flight, because the spinning DVD-ROM takes up the majority or all of the juice.
- Operate your laptop in room temperature whenever possible, because Lithium-Ion battery doesn't like extreme temperatures.
- Carry a spare battery-pack, just in case...
- Fully recharge and discharge your battery-pack from time to time, especially when going on a journey.
- Minimize the brightness of your LCD screen, the major juice drainer. That should provide you around 45 minutes to one hour of extra usage time.
- Defragment your hard drives once in six months and increase your RAM capacity.
- Cut off the programs running in the background or sitting idly on your taskbar. They tend to use up more processing power. Stop those unnecessary services running in the background if you're an Xp user.
- Clean your battery contacts periodically.
- Do not run many programs at once. Word processing programs use up lesser battery power than a spreadsheet or a graphics program. Keep that in mind.
- Lower the graphics and audio use - such as displaying an animated slideshow or listening to MP3.
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