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Ever been on a long flight, ready to hunker down and get some work done, only to discover that your laptop battery is plunging toward the red zone an hour after takeoff? So have we. That's why we've gathered these simple tips that will preserve your notebook's juice and boost your productivity. Read them now. You'll thank yourself later.
- Sleep Is Good. Use the operating system's power-management features (in Windows XP, under Power Options in the Control Panel; or in Vista, under Mobile PC in the Control Panel) to set aggressive targets for when the display will go dark and when the machine will slip into sleep mode. And if you can spare the extra time it takes for the machine to resume, set the PC to hibernate, not just sleep, when you close the lid.
- Dim the Lights
Turn down the brightness of the LCD panel to the lowest level you can tolerate. The backlight sucks power like the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.
- Watch Scheduled Tasks
Be sure that your periodic virus scan is set to a time when you're usually plugged in; running a full-disk virus check keeps the hard drive and CPU fully engaged for the better part of an hour
- For lithium ion laptop battery, you do not need to discharge them fully and recharge constantly. Since they don't have the same "memory" as older nickel-metal hydride laptop battery, it is actually better to discharge a lithium ion only partially before recharging. You need to do a full discharge only about every 30 charges.
- Lay Off the Multimedia
A little in-flight music is nice while you construct that PowerPoint presentation, but streaming music from your hard drive means the disk is always spinning.
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