If you take the time to make a few adjustments to your laptop, while keeping battery conservation at the forefront of your mind, you can effectively extend the power of the battery's life and, until you can plug in your computer, avoid losing the use of it.
Click on low-power settings, such as "sleep," "standby" or "suspend" when you close your computer, but don't want to completely shut it down. This works two-fold. It gives you the opportunity to resume your work quickly while saving power. "Hibernate" uses less power than "sleep." It shuts your computer down and saves everything to the hard drive. When you resume power, your desktop is exactly as you left it, saving you time.
Remove any USB devices or PC cards you don't need to conserve battery power. If your computer uses a wireless card, remove it when you don't need the connection. Disable any devices, via your computer's device manager, that you aren't using, such as your modem, network card or DVD/CD-ROM drive.
Dim the screen on your laptop. Check the keyboard for function keys that will allow you to do so, or consult your user's manual. A dim screen uses less battery power than a bright one. Set your computer screen to go blank after a certain period of time, such as five minutes of inactivity. If you are interrupted while working for longer than the period of time you select, the blank screen will appear and save power.
Prioritise your work; if you don't have to multi task don't. Consider switching off the autosave functions in MS Word or other applications. They are great but as they keep saving at regular intervals, they make your hard disk work harder, eating up battery power. That said, we should add a word of warning: when your battery is low switch autosave back on so you don't lose work if the computer unexpectedly switches off when the battery goes flat.
Unplug unnecessary devices such as additional speakers, or things like DVD and hard disks that take power via USB from the laptop. Consider changing your screen resolution and brightness. The brighter the screen appears, the more electricity it is consuming. Work from your hard disk rather than the CD or DVD drive. On some laptops, you can even remove the optical drive.
In this feature we'll give you hints and tips on how you can prolong the running time of your notebook's battery. On many netbooks, there may be fewer options to tweak, but you can still follow our tips to make your battery last longer.
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