We thought we’d dedicate some time to highlighting some of the things that you can do to make sure that your battery life is preserved. By taking advantage of just a few of these steps you can save yourself an average of 20 minutes every hour. This might not be much but saving 20 minutes a day by reducing the back light on your keyboard could mean gaining an extra year with said laptop
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Don’t Need? Don’t Plug! – One of the reasons you might be losing battery life rapidly is if you normally connect a USB mouse or wireless keyboard to your laptop. The system always requires less energy when using the trackpad and keyboard that come with it
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Do Not Multitask – An average laptop user is bound to have a few programs and Apps running at once on their laptop. The harder your computer has to work to keep all these programs open the faster it consumes power. To prevent this you should try minimising the number of Apps opened at once to just one or two.
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Clean Everything – Dust has the potential of gathering on any surface within a prolonged period and although you might not notice that the dust then go on to clog the vent in your laptop which in turn leads the laptop to work even harder to keep cool which can then shorten the battery life. You should aim to clean your work surface and laptop components at appropriate intervals.
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Clean Battery and Battery Hub – You should be cleaning your battery and the battery hubs ideally every couple of months. To be sure that the power being transferred from battery to computer is as effective as possible wipe both with alcohol (Find out which is battery friendly). Make sure that the battery is properly dried before inserting it back into the hub
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Do not Constantly keep Laptop on Charge – It is always advisable to give your battery a rest whenever you can. You could take out the battery and plug to the wall.
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Don’t Charge and Work – Charging your laptop makes the temperature go up, now imagine what happens when you are charging it and running a variety of software at the same time? One option is to stop using it and keep it on charge and the other option is to take out the battery whilst the laptop is plugged into the wall.
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Turn down Brightness – The backlight on your screen and sometimes keyboard uses up a lot of power on your battery, you should try to turn it down to the lowest level possible. Doing this can save up to 15% of your battery life.
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Turn off Bluetooth – Bluetooth of your laptop can be very powerful which is why keeping if on at all times can drain your battery faster than normal. Turning off your Bluetooth when its not in use should become an habit to get more power from your battery.
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Stop updates on Battery – Running updates on your laptop is also a major user of battery life. Virus scanners, extension and software updates among others can be updated when your laptop is connected to the wall. You can change the settings on your laptop to make sure it only updates when it is connected to the wall.
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Work on a hard surface – Although the name suggests the best place to use your laptop is on your lap we recommend otherwise. Placing your laptop on your lap doesn’t allow the system’s temperature to cool down because of trapped ventilation. It is advisable to use your laptop on a hard surface because it provides enough ventilation to cool the temperature. If you really can’t help by placing the laptop on your lap then we advice you invest in a cooling pad.
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Use Correct Power Cord – You should always endeavour to use the correct charger to charge your battery. Alternative chargers do not necessarily mean an identical charge capacity.
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Turn off Locations – Applications that can track your locations are some of the worst users of your battery life. Leaving it on means that your phone is regularly connecting with phone towers every couple of seconds which then drains the battery.
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Power Management – It is always a good idea to make use of the Power management system on your laptop. While your laptop is unplugged you can manage the power being discharged by reducing the speed of your CPU which in turn extends your battery life.
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Grounded Airplane Mode – If you are out of options and need a drastic short term solution you can put your laptop on airplane mode. Air plane mode turns off every form of wireless communication with the laptop. But then again what good is your laptop if you can’t connect it to Wi-Fi?
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Recalibrate Battery – Your laptop might not be displaying the actually percentage of battery life you have left, when this happens its time to recalibrate the battery. To do this you should turn off all applications and the put the computer to sleep and leave it on charge. Once it has been fully charged you should then unplug, turn it back and leave to run the battery all the way down (Make sure you have turned off the laptop’s ability to sleep or hibernate). After that you should charge it back up again and then you can see if the battery is really dead or just needed to be recalibrated.
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80/20 Method – The 80/20 method basically dictates that your laptop should not go below 20% or above 80%. Although this is not an exact science and results may vary between different laptops this method might help with prolonging the life of your battery.
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Defragging – Defragging essentially means freeing up space on your laptop from downloading software that does not occupy continuous memory location leaving a bunch of inaccessible folders. Defragging your laptop frees up space which in turn puts less pressure on hard disk which in turn improve the battery life.
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Replace with SSD (Solid State Drive) – If you can you should replace your hard drive with a SSD, a hard drive requires a lot of power in a short amount of time to spin. And all that spinning slowly wears out the battery life. So if you can afford it you should invest in SSD which uses a lot less power.
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Optimise Power Setting – There are a variety of setting s on your laptop that start draining the battery as soon as they are opened. So improve battery life you should disable the screensaver setting and even flash if you don’t need them.
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Ultra-Fast Chargers – Ultra-fast chargers like the name suggests is an amazingly fast way to charge your laptop. However in the long run it affects the longevity of your battery.
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Music – Playing music on your laptop is also a major user of battery power, you should stick to playing music on your phone or an audio device. The battery on your phone lasts longer that your laptop.
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Keyboard Lighting – Keyboard lighting although useful sometimes is not always needed. And as with anything it uses energy to stay lit, turning this off can save you 5 minutes of battery life every hour.
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Sleep Mode – You can set your laptop to go to sleep is it has been inactive for more than 5 minutes. Saving every bit of battery life that you can might not seem like a big deal, but you will appreciate those extra minutes when you need it the most.
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Switch to Firefox – An article in Forbes magazine highlights how Google Chrome might be reducing the battery life on your laptop. The summary of it all is that the longer chrome stays open for the more energy it uses which in turn kills your battery faster. If you can you should
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Backup Battery – This is an oldie but goodie, what’s better than one laptop battery? Two laptop batteries! This is as simple as it sounds, you should invest in a backup battery for your device. It’s good to have when you know that you are going to be away from your charger or a power outlet.
