5 Tips to Extend the Life of your Laptop Battery

If you travel for work, you've probably experienced something like this before: You board an airplane for a long flight with the idea of getting some work done during the trip. With several hours free from cell phones and the usual office interruptions, you should be able to get some real work done — until you realize that your laptop battery's going dead and there's no way to recharge before arriving at your destination. What to do? Here are five suggestions to keep going as long as possible.

(A word of warning: If you've given up working on your spreadsheet in exchange for watching your latest DVD from Netflix, you may be in trouble. Games and DVD movies eat up battery life fast; unless you charged up at the airport, your laptop may be dead before you get your drink.)

1) Reduce Brightness

You can reduce the brightness level on your screen and use less power while still having enough visibility to get your work done. Screens set at 100% brightness will use up about 15 percent more battery life than screens at 50 percent brightness, so you can get a little more life out of your laptop battery by reducing the brightness of your monitor under your Control Panel > Display (PC) or under System Preferences > Displays (Mac).

2) Reduce Power Use

If you're running Windows XP, you can go into the Power Options menu found in your Control Panel and reduce the power consumption of your laptop. On a Mac, look for the Energy Saver option in your System Preferences. You can also set alarms to go off when the battery is about to die (for instance, at five percent) so you can do one last save of your files before the battery goes down.

3) Simplify

If you're typing up notes from a meeting or just need to put something in writing, use a basic text editor such as Notepad instead of Word, which uses a lot of RAM and, therefore, battery life. You can always save and then cut and paste these notes into your word processing program later if you need to. Also, it's a good idea to run only one application at a time to reduce power.

4) Remove Extra Devices

Make sure you don't have any devices plugged in that can drain power, such as a webcam, USB drive or mouse, or wireless PC card. If you're not using the plane's Wi-Fi (now available on many aircraft), be sure to turn this feature off.

5) Make Sure You Have The Right Amount of RAM

Obviously, this is not something you can do while on-board, but this can make a difference in battery life. RAM enables your system to run programs using the computer memory rather than the hard disk drive (HDD), where it stores data. Refreshing the RAM requires less power than spinning the hard drive, so having the correct amount of RAM means less drain on your laptop battery. You'll probably need 2 GB or more RAM for the best performance.