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I am on the planes a decent amount of the time (100,000 miles by late May) and tend to spend a Laptop Battery chunk of my flights using mydell laptop battery. Most of the time it’s productive, but it can also include a DVD or the occasional game (either Nethack or Battle for Middle-Earth 2, which are obviously similar). When I was a-hunting for a laptop, battery life was a key criterion in my selection process, as was weight. While I like my Vaio VGN SZ-160P, the standard battery was lasting about 3 hoursInspiron 6000 (the extended life clocks in under six hours before my tweaks), not enough for the SFO-JFK route (now switching to SFO-EWR as a default due to Manhattan traffic, which is a huge bummer because TD175 laptop battery United’s P.S. flights have standard AC outlets on board).

So I did a lil’ Googlin’ for tips on extending battery life, and I found them all pretty, well, lacking.Inspiron 9300 Stuff like “don’t try to do real-time 3d rendering” or “fully charge up your battery before flying.” One of them even said “buy an extra battery.” Not exactly helpful (Sony’s tips are in the picture on the right). The most common tip that I’ve found truly deceptive is on disabling wireless: many claim it makes a huge impact to disable it, but personally I’ve only noticed a minor difference. I do Inspiron 9400 in fact disable it (and Bluetooth) but on my Vaio the difference was about 10 minutes over 3 hours dell laptop battery (but as I state below, it all adds up).

Alas, I’ve gone and done a lot of experimenting and have a list of my tips to really maximize battery life for my laptop.

Key to this process is having some good methodology. While testing, I kept a plain text file on my Desktop (creatively called “battery.txt”) tracking the real clock as well as Windows’ expected battery life. The problem with the Windows tool, is it really just tells you the current state of the battery based on the current system activity. This laptop battery means if you start with 3 hours remaining 310-6321 then spend 30 minutes doing something that rapidly consumes the Latitude D820 battery, you’ll be down to 2 or less. In other words, you need to track the actual history/lifespan of your battery if you want to get the best information out of your system. You can check out my little tracking file for inspiration.

Brightness: how low can you go? Without any question, the fastest way 310-6322 to suck the life out of a battery is leaving your brightness high. Turn it down as low as you possibly can without needing to up your glasses prescription. On my Vaio, I can select from one of 8 levels. During one test, at brightness level 3 my system reported 60% full, with 3:52 (all times are hours:minutes) of life to go. I switched up to level 5 and in 17 minutes of use, I was down to 52% full, with 3:06 to go. In other words, 17 minutes used 46 minutes worth of D5318 (all other variables were held constant). You can even be so bold as to lower your Latitude D830 laptop battery brightness all the way down when sitting idle for a minute or two (for example, if you are writing a long blog post and pause to clarify your thoughts before typing).
Don’t use any external devices. USB and PC-Cards (aka PC-MCIA) use your battery to function, even when you aren’t using them! Have an EVDO card or maybe a USB mouse? Remove them if you can. Even a memory card reader in your PC-MCIA slot uses power G5260 just by being in there. The effect varies based on the type of device, but even a few minutes here and there (as you’ll see) add up significantly.
Single-task, not multi-task. The more you are MM165 laptop battery doing at the same time with your PC, the more memory and CPU usage increases. Both of which directly use up battery. Close any applications you aren’t using, even the small ones. When doing some experimentation, I found it more efficient to run a single application at a time, then close it and open a new G5266 one when ready to move on. While your hard drive uses the battery too, if you are doing anything ‘productive’ you are probably hitting the drive on a regular (even if infrequent) basis YD626 laptop battery anyway.
Keep it cool. You can take a page out of the extreme gamer’s handbooks, and have your system perform more optimally by keeping it cool. Make sure your air vents (inflow and outflow) aren’t blocked by anything, which often occurs by poorly positioning your notebook on your lap (which is known to have some other side-effects too, by the way). Heavy CPU and memory use all contribute to heat as well, hence my comment Latitude CPi 312-0393laptop battery on multi-tasking above.