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Prolonging Your Battery’s Life
By: Azlan
Apparently, the main vantage of laptops is mobility. Naturally, however, laptops need power to run on. Despite the fact that electric receptacles are bountiful and can be encountered just about everywhere, there are times when we have to resort to using the laptop's battery - airplane trips, meetings, etc. I have also come across unexpected power outages when I could have missed all my work if the laptop didn’t have a loaded battery. Despite the ongoing evolution of battery technology, there are limitations to their use, and that leads to a discussion of means to conserve and improve battery functionality.
Just as appropriate consumption and upkeep of your automobile will result in longer life and better performance, adopting certain steps with your portable electronics' batteries will result in longer use per charge, and a longer whole battery life. With replacement laptop batteries ranging from anywhere between $100.00 and $300.00, getting all the consumption you can out of your battery will save you lots of aggravation and keep more money in your pocket longer.
As soon as your portable gadget goes out of the maker's location, its battery starts losing capacity to store a charge. In some cases, it may show more charge stored than there actually is. You may end up draining the available power without being aware of it, and the computer may end up shutting down and cause you to lose the work you’ve already finished. Now that is not a situation you want to find yourself in. It is inevitable after a certain period of time, as the battery goes through gradual degradation. There are, however, ways to extend your battery life.
If your device always (or usually) runs on external power, you may be inadvertently decreasing your battery life. At least once a month, let the device consume all the battery power. In other words, let the battery drain until the computer rests ("hibernate mode") and then let it re-charge. This can help avoid capacity degradation.
Some notebooks, using a combination of specialized hardware, intelligent batteries, and special "services" (small programs running in the background) offer a "recondition" feature. This feature will automatically prompt you to condition your battery and then attempt to do so in the background. If you are prompted by your system to condition your battery, you should probably allow it to do this.
Operating temperature is another crucial element when we speak about battery life. Exceedingly high temperatures can cause your laptop batteries to break down faster, just as extreme low temperatures can harm batteries, so don't leave your notebook in your car for extended periods on hot days or overnight on cold nights.
Some people just plug their laptops into an electrical outlet and use them without a spare battery in the bay. It is never a good idea to do this, since the electrical terminals in the battery bay of your laptop may get filthy or get rusted. t should be avoided for these reasons, plus the fact that you may lose your work since there is no backup power supply.
Even though modern monitors do not consume a lot of electricity, monitors, hard drives, and the CPU are the three biggest electricity consumers on your laptop. Big, brilliant LCD monitors with backlights call for relatively considerable quantities of electrical power, as do the gyrating motors and actuators within hard drives. It is a good idea to shut your monitor off when you are not using it.
Article Source: http://www.ezarticles.info
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