I know we have a special attraction to our laptops. This is for obvious reasons like portability and for most us if not all of us who are tech-savvy, it’s a mobile office and others it’s their permanent office.
However, I know you have also appeared to do a business presentation or your monthly departmental reports and the laptop battery decided to ‘kaput’. Or you‘ve bought a laptop and you are enjoying long hours of battery and you think you have the best of the batteries. This is article is what you need to help you know how to save your battery life and improve your battery performance.
Charging patterns
I know you will be quick to ask this question, Should I remove the battery when A/C is plugged in? Well, this question is YES or NO depending with the situation. Having a battery fully charged and the laptop plugged in is not harmful, because as soon as the charge level reaches 100% the battery stops receiving charging energy and this energy is bypassed directly to the power supply system of the laptop. However, the only disadvantage which is overheating, some laptops, however, don not overheat. This overheating is caused by some hardware e.g. CPU and hard disk.
Normally, if the laptop doesn’t get too hot i.e. 40ºC to 50ºC, let the battery remain in the socket. However if the temperatures rises above 60ºC, especially when playing games, you should remove the battery.
Full battery discharges (until laptop power shutdown, 0%) should be avoided, because this stresses the battery a lot and can even damage it. It's recommended to perform partial discharges to capacity levels of 20~30% and frequent charges, instead of performing a full discharging followed by a full charging.
The following are good practices to keep you battery life well.
- Always keep your laptop in a cool environment, not in direct sunlight.
- Make sure you have updated versions of software in your laptop. Outdated versions consume a lot of energy.
- Adjust your screen brightness to the lowest your eyes can handle.
- Turn off Wi-Fi, Bluetooth if not in use.
- Work on 1-2 programs at a time and close all others that not in use.
- Choose hibernate mode instead of sleep mode.
- Make sure you use the right network adapter for your laptop model.
- If you are not using your laptop for a long period of time, make sure you keep it in cool place and the battery should be 40-50%. Don’t leave an empty battery.
