Saving Your Laptop Battery Life

[JustMe Owner]

If you use a Laptop you might find it very helpful to check out this
about how to save your power use.
this is the link to a video on how to
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/index.php?rn=222561&cl=11435725&ch=8809584


or you can read about it here

http://ca.tech.yahoo.com/experts/peterwilson/article/463
or below where I am copying and pasting it


Saving Your Laptop Battery Life
By Peter Wilson



You bought that laptop because you wanted portable computing — for the
plane, the classroom or that crucial conference. And the worst thing
that can happen is for your battery to fade and then, ultimately,
fail, which always seems to happen in-flight when you've just typed in
that key paragraph. Here are some ways to keep your battery buoyant:

— Dim your screen. Nothing slurps up laptop power more than the
backlight for your LCD display.

— Leave the gaming, the multimedia manipulations, the MP3 playing,
video watching and all the other heavy-duty, battery-depleting
activities until you get home or are plugged in to the power in your
dorm or hotel room.

(Now that Intel's new laptop-aimed Centrino 2 chipset has been
introduced, there is some relief on this front. The Centrino 2, being
offered in new models from some manufacturers, allows notebook users
to switch between using battery-intensive discrete graphics and less-
power-consuming integrated graphics. Plus, says Intel, its new 2.8 GHz
processor will consume 60 per cent less electricity on a single task.)

— Turn off the WiFi and Bluetooth and ditch the USB devices, like
that external hard drive. These, too, exhaust the battery.

— Check to make sure that you're not running unnecessary programs in
the background.

— Never leave discs in your CD or DVD drive. They're constantly
spinning and that, as you might guess, uses power.

— Consider buying an external battery pack. The price (which is
directly related to the extra hours such a device keeps your laptop
alive) can run from $150 to the $500 range. That means battery packs
are likely more relevant to the business traveller than the student.

— Use the settings in the Mobile PC section of the Windows Vista
control panel to cut your power usage. In particular, you can choose
the power saver option. While this will cut back on performance,
you'll be happier if your battery stays alive.

—If you have a Mac, then go to System Preferences and click on the
Energy Saver panel and reduce the time for your laptop and its LCD
screen to be put to sleep when you stop using it for a while. Five
minutes of inactivity might be a good first setting to use. If this
is too little time, you can always adjust it upward.

— Remember that, unlike older batteries, the now-standard lithium-ion
ones don't need to be fully discharged before you recharge. In fact,
frequent full discharging actually shortens battery life. However,
some experts do recommend a full discharge every 30 charges to
preserve the accuracy of the built-in gauge that tells you how much
battery life you have left. The fact is that nobody wants to be
surprised when their laptop, which says it still has 30 per cent of
its power left, up and dies in the middle of a sentence and leaves
them screaming in despair.

— Don't let your battery get too hot because heat is a major enemy of
battery life. In other words, a car on a sunny day in August in Death
Valley (or even at the beach in Vancouver) is not a good place for
your laptop.

— If you have to store a spare battery for any length of time, keep it
in the refrigerator (but not the freezer). Best to have a 40 per cent
charge left in it, too.

— Remember to stagger purchases of batteries because your spare will
have a similar life expectancy to the one that came with the laptop.
If you buy batteries together then they could both die at about the
same time. And then what’s the point of having a spare?

— Give some thought to removing the battery from the laptop when
you’re operating from household or hotel power. This avoids a possible
build-up of moisture and dust in the battery casing. However (and
here's the catch) if you do pull that battery then you’re taking a
risk of calamity if a tree falls on the power line outside your house.

— Better, then, when you've got that battery removed, to connect to a
uninterrupted power supply (UPS) that kicks in when the electricity
fails. Again, like portable batteries, a UPS is not cheap, but gosh
it's good insurance against digital disaster, even for your desktop
and all the peripherals. Take it from a guy whose household power
fails about twice a year. My neighbours say they can still hear the
screams.