| Tip 1: Power Down the Display | | | | discharge it completely. Next, charge it to 100 percent |
| Do you know one of the most effective ways to | | | | again. This is not a pointless exercise - it 'conditions' the |
| conserve laptop battery life is to lower the brightness | | | | battery and helps it remember exactly how much |
| of the screen display? Its been known that lowering | | | | electrical charge it can hold. After you do that, you will |
| one level of screen brightness will yield up to 10 more | | | | never need to completely discharge the battery again. |
| minutes of battery life. You can easily do this by going | | | | Tip 4: Disable Startup Items |
| to Start > Settings > Control Panel > Display | | | | Here's another tip. Disable your unneeded startup |
| and clicking the Settings tab. You can also disable | | | | items! I find it very irritating whenever my laptop boots |
| those cool effects like ClearType fonts and fade | | | | up and I've to wait like 20 seconds for all manner of |
| effects to reduce the CPU's power consumption. | | | | little program bits to load into memory. You can disable |
| Tip 2: Decrease Hard Drive Activity | | | | those startup programs. Go to the associated |
| You can also optimize the Windows' paging file - the | | | | programs and click on the Options or Preferences |
| area of the laptop hard drive that serves as virtual | | | | menu to do this. You can also go to the Startup tab in |
| memory whenever your RAM is full. Optimizing the | | | | your Start Menu and clear programs you don't want to |
| paging file size ensures your hard drive is accessed | | | | run at boot time. |
| less frequently when you run out of system memory. | | | | Tip 5: Turn Off Unused Devices |
| To change it, go to the Control Panel > System > | | | | And here's another tip for you. As you may know, |
| Advanced > Performance Settings > Advanced | | | | many modern laptops have a Wi-Fi built in. Unknown to |
| > Virtual Memory Change. Set both the initial and | | | | many people, that Wi-Fi connection is a power guzzler! |
| maximum paging file size to 1.5 times the capacity of | | | | Make sure you turn off the Wi-Fi connection using the |
| your installed RAM size. | | | | external Wi-Fi on-off switch. If your laptop does not |
| Your laptop hard drive is another power eating culprit. | | | | offer such a switch, you should go to the Control |
| To save power, you should reduce the frequency with | | | | Panel > System > Hardware > Device |
| which your hard disk has to spin. To do this, you can | | | | Manager and disable the infrared transceiver, Ethernet |
| try defragmenting your hard drive regularly. This can | | | | adapter and Bluetooth radio. |
| be done using the Disk Degfragmenter in the Start > | | | | Conclusion |
| Programs > Accessories > System Tools menu. | | | | I hope this article has shown you some good tips on |
| Tip 3: Condition the Battery | | | | conserving laptop battery life. Follow the above tips so |
| One thing you should remember about laptop batteries. | | | | that the next time you're sipping coffee in Starbucks, |
| You need to condition it. When you first buy your | | | | you have lots of battery life left in your laptop for |
| laptop, charge the battery to 100 percent and then | | | | surfing and working. Until next time, happy computing! |