You’ve had to buy a new battery for your laptop. Want to learn how to keep this battery until your computer is finally obsolete? We’ve gathered a few ideas how to lengthen the life of your battery.
- When you need to charge the battery, be sure it charges it until the battery is at 100%. If you don’t make it to 100%, you diminish some of the storage capacity of the battery. In the long run, this will shrink the power capacity of the battery and will ultimately cause you to be where you are now buying a new battery.
- Utilize the Power Management Tools on the Control Panel. By updating the Control Panel and changing things like the amount of time before the laptop goes into sleep mode, or turning off the screen saver and other non-essential background programs, you can save your battery power for when it counts.
- You may not be aware of this, but when you install a program, oftentimes hidden software protocols will load in the background on startup to do things like find updates, then continue running. While these programs may not be an issue when you’re on a/c power, when you’re running on stored power they can cause additional problems that you don’t need. So, when running off the grid, be sure and right click on the icons in your start bar and turn as much as possible off. Even turn off your wireless internet if you’re not shopping!
- Batteries are like big jugs of water sitting around in the sun. If you don’t get rid of all of the water occasionally, the water inside starts evaporating and leaving behind yucky stuff that, if you’re not careful, will make that jug unsanitary after a while. What you should do is, every month or so, drain all of the power of your battery by unplugging it from your surge protector and disabling all the power saving settings we just had you set up and let the battery empty itself. Then, without starting your operating system, plug the computer back into the surge protector and leave it to charge overnight. Depleting the battery allows it to clear the residual memory and that will make it more able to keep a charge in the long run.
- All of us laptop owners are guilty of this one, which is most assuredly why the battery manufacturers are doing just fine. Did you know that you’re supposed to pull the battery out when you’re not utilizing it? Laptop manufacturers must hide that little bit of information in the fine print at the back of the manual (as if I actually read the manual!), because I, for one, had no idea. Be sure when you follow their recommendations to put it in a cool dry place.
- Finally, laptops and their batteries are much like us – they don’t react well if they overheat. So, if you’re lying by the pool while surfing the net, be sure your laptop is out of direct sunlight and, if you’re dripping in the heat, then your laptop most certainly isn’t in good shape, either, and you should probably resume your surfing inside with the air conditioning.