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Breathe new life into your laptop’s battery

With these tips, you can keep your aging battery working for years (and for hours between charges).

By Lincoln Spector / Wednesday, July 28 2010

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Getting the timing right may take a couple of tries. If the PC doesn’t have enough power to boot, plug in AC until you’re at the setup program, and then unplug it.



Leave the notebook on until it shuts off. This can take some time (45 minutes on my laptop); setup uses a lot less power than Windows does. Once the laptop is off, plug in the AC power, and then wait a few hours before rebooting to Windows and confirming that you have a full recharge. Repeat the process once or twice.

With some luck and proper care, your battery will still be useful when you’re looking for a new laptop.

Extend a battery’s life between charges
The tips I’ve outlined above should lengthen the amount of time before you need to replace your laptop’s battery. On a day-to-day basis, however, you should be far more concerned with another type of battery life: how long you can keep your laptop running without AC power. You may know most of the following tips already, but it never hurts to refresh (or recharge) your memory.

Dim your screen: Your laptop’s backlight uses a lot of juice. Keep it as dim yet readable as you comfortably can.

Shut off unneeded hardware: Turn off Bluetooth. If you’re not using the internet, turn off the laptop’s Wi-Fi receiver, as well. Don’t use an external mouse or other device. And finally, mute the notebook’s sound system; this not only saves power but also avoids annoying everyone else in the cafe. Avoid multimedia: Save hefty chores such as photo editing and watching videos for when your system has AC power. If you must listen to music, use your iPod (or a similar dedicated device).

Know when to sleep and when to hibernate: You need to think about when you want to save power by sending your laptop into Standby or Sleep mode, and when you want to hibernate it.

There is a difference. XP’s Standby mode and Vista and Windows 7’s Sleep mode keep your PC on, using some power, but less of it than in normal use. Hibernate saves the PC’s state to the hard drive, and then shuts it off entirely so that the system uses no power.

Regrettably, Windows takes much longer – sometimes minutes – to enter and leave hibernation. And during those minutes, the battery is draining heavily and you can’t work.

Windows XP’s Standby mode isn’t really all that efficient. If you know that your XP laptop will be inactive for more than about half an hour, hibernate it. Otherwise, use Standby.

Vista and Windows 7 do a much better job with their Sleep mode. Don’t bother hibernating your notebook unless you think that you’ll be going more than two or three hours without using it.