Getting More Laptop Battery Life - "Good to the Last Drop"

by Barry J. Doyle, republished fromTabletPCReviewSpot.com

Getting More Laptop Battery Life - "Good to the Last Drop"

So you got a fancy laptop computer with Intel's Pentium M or Celeron M chip, or maybe you went for AMD's Athlon M chip. You got built-in Wi-Fi. Maybe even Bluetooth for your peripherals. You are cutting the cord once and for all right? Making it through a long flight or the most or your day without "plugging in" is a goal most mobile professionals and enthusiasts wish to accomplish. Whether you are a long time user of Tablet PC's or Notebook computers, we have a 7 tips that just might help you squeeze out some extra time out of your battery per charge.

Don't do it, we can help you!

Tip 1: Starting Off Right

Our fist tip is to get you off to a good start. When you purchase a new laptop it is essential to calibrate and break in your new battery properly. When you first unbox your new machine, the first place it belongs (after installing the battery) is connected to an AC outlet. Even if the battery indicator shows a full or near full charge, it is a good idea to keep the unit plugged in for a minimum of 5-7 hours. After this initial and absolute full charge, unplug it and have your way with it! Drain that battery until you "force it to shut down" (save your work upon the low battery alert). Then proceed to charge it up again to 100% (this time just charge it to "full"). Go ahead and repeat the drain to zero. After 3 full charge and discharge cycles, your battery is ready for the road.

This process does 2 things. First off, it breaks in your new battery right. Second it calibrates it with your computer to give you a more accurate measurement of charge status from the software's indicator. Over time your battery will slip away from calibration, so it is suggested that you repeat one "full charge" and "discharge" every 3 months. Refer to your owner's manual if you wish as some manufacturers may recommend a slightly different calibration technique.

Tip 2: How Many Times Do We Have to Tell You to Turn off the Light!

The biggest culprit of battery drainage is hands down - the display. Want more time per charge? Turn that sucker down to a tolerable, but comfortable level.

Tip 3: Turn off Unnecessary Hardware

You heard the flight attendant. "Turn off your cell phones during the duration of the flight". Use that as your cue to remember to shut off your WiFi, Bluetooth radio and to remove unneeded PCMCIA cards from the slot if you are not using them. These devices all drain your battery.

Tip 4: Tame Windows

Did you know that you have programs "checking for updates", scanning files and running tasks that you don't know about? All of this unnecessary activity accesses your hard drive and over time makes an impact on your battery's charge. You can easily disable these services while on DC power. Here's how:

Click "Start", "All Programs", "Accessories", "System Tools", and finally on "Scheduled Tasks". Right-click on any scheduled task in the list you wish to disable and click "Properties". Select the Settings tab. Under "Power Management", choose "Don't start the task if the computer is running on batteries" and "Stop the task if battery mode begins." Click OK on each selection to save your changes. You are bound to find several "culprits" that you could care less about while you are out and about running yournotebook on batteries.

Tip 5: Choose the Right Power Setting

In the Control Panel go to "Power Options". In the "Power schemes" drop down list, be sure to select either the "Portable/Laptop" or "Max Battery" option.

Tip 6: Add More RAM!

Shhh. This one is a secret of the pros! If you have only 256MB of RAM, your machine is sure to write temporary information to the hard drive constantly. Boost that up to 512MB or even better 768MB+ and you will be sure to minimize this issue, thereby keeping hard drive access to a minimum. No matter what kind of "power saving technology" your processor has, your hard drive is a leech on your battery.

Tip 7: Only Run DVD's and CD's Unless you Have to

Gamers, if you must game on the plane - get a "virtual CD drive" application. There are many out there which allow you to copy an image of your CD to the hard drive, which spares power to run your optical drive. Movie buffs - your bound to drain that battery watching DVD's. The solution: umm well... none at this time.

We hope you find these tips helpful. If any readers have more to add please be sure to post under the "discuss this story" link. We would be glad to learn more!

- Barry

 

hey Barry, these are all really great tips. One thing I'll add is that if you happen to store a battery make sure it is stored in a cool and dry place. Also, Li-Ion batteries will lose life over time even if they're not used....so if you store a battery for two years the chemical compounds inside will have changed/deteoriated enough so that the battery will not have the same life as it did on day 1, even if it's never used. So there's a bit of a use it or lose it factor to it too.

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Humm, I never thought about that advantage to having more ram, maybe I'll get a gig of ram for sure now... Nicepost Barry!

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Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. [Mark 12:30]

 

You can actually perform a similar procedure for watching your DVD's. Just rip the image to your harddrive using DVDDecrypter or DVDShrink and then using something like Daemon Tools to mount the image so that you can watch in your favorite program for DVD playback. All the programs for freely distributed.

http://www.dvdshrink.org
http://www.dvddecrypter.com
http://www.daemon-tools.cc

 

if you are a linux user, read up on 'laptop-mode' - it's a kernel mode that you can setup to manage disk I/O...

basicially it set's it up so it caches everything it can and only spins up the HD when it needs to read uncached data.. for writing, it writes changes back to the disk on a set interval. This cuts down a lot on disk activity and increases battery life

As long as it's setup properly, it will automatically disable when battery life gets low, ensuring you don't loose any data if your battery dies.



--
LG LM50 / Dothan 745
jerrett.net

 

In addition to storing the battery in a cool and dry place, Li-Ion batteries actually last longest if they are stored partially full. In fact, leaving your battery in a constantly running laptop (I know people do this...) for one year could reduce its capacity to 65% due to heat and being at 100% full charge. It is also harmful to store a completely empty battery!

Because of all this I wish laptops had an option to only charge to 90%.

This is a great resource on prolonging li-ion batteries: http://www.batteryuniversity.com/parttwo-34.htm

 

Great tips. I'll find those very usefull.

What's a rough estimate of how much more battery life you get when you have 256MB RAM compared to 512MB RAM, 768MB RAM, 1GBMB RAM, etc? Are there significant increases for every 256MB RAM you add?

thanks.

 

I'm interested about the +RAM as well.

Also, for the # of cells in batteries, how much more, in percentage if possible, are the batteries compared to each other?

Thanks

 

very useful comments about battery life. i wish i had known that a while ago. my HP's l-ion battery has just now after a couple years of reliable service started depleting very rapidly. it now goes from 100 to almost zero in about 30 mins. is this normal? just a function of age? is it also becuase i usually work plugged in?

 

This is a very useful post. Do we need to remove the battery from the system? Do we need to remove whenever the charge is 100% and we still want to keep the laptop plugged? When we run the DVD on power, do we need to remove the battery from the laptop? Do we need to unplug the power as soon as the battery reaches 100% to avoid overcharging. Thanks.

 

A number of your concerns (below) are covered in the battery guide. Please refer to it for some more information.

Have you been calibrating your battery at all during these two years? It doesn't seem out of the ordinary that your battery's cells are quite aged after 2 years of constant use.

You do not need to remove the battery if you do not want to. Your notebook should stop the charge once it hits 100% on its own.

 

Is this automatically done by the notebook or do we need to set it up? How do we check whether the notebook stops charging after battery reaches 100%? Thanks.

 

great post