Laptop Battery Problems And What To Do About Them
Laptop batteries can sometimes be irritating as some can crash within 15 minutes or sometimes within 2 seconds. The battery consists of some control circuitry, a plastic outer case, metal electrical contacts, an inner metal case filled with a chemical, and special electrical contacts called electrodes.
Summing up the battery
A Battery could be one of the following kinds, the Lithium Ion (Li-Ion) or a Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) battery. There is either some control circuitry in a battery or none at all. There is an overheat/over-current/short circuit protection with a thermal sensor and circuit that cuts off charging and/or usage if the battery gets too hot. Lithium Ion, breaks down if the battery gets discharged below a certain point so the discharge protection circuit cuts off usage just before this point is reached. Charge of the battery can be known from a meter of LFDs.
How does the batteries behave in each case? In case of Gataway Solo 5300, the charging circuit does not reactivate once fully charged, until the laptop is used. To recharge it, one needs to unplug it from the AC for just a minute, and then reconnect. When using the battery, the power level is sometimes down by 5% when the computer is turned on whereby the Windows goes back into standby. One can see the battery fully charged by turning it on again. Some models of IBM ThinkPads have defective battery designs that lead to premature battery death. Tips to maximize laptop battery life Turn the brightness down to the comfort level of a normal eye. High level of brightness consumes more power which means sucking up of more battery power.
Any external devices like USB and PC-Cards should not be used.
The more tasks the lap top is performing simultaneously, the more memory and CPU usage will be there. Both of which directly use up battery along with restricting the speed of the laptop. The laptop operates optimally if it is kept cool. It is good to ensure the air vents both inflow and outflow are kept free and not blocked by anything. Heavy CPU and memory use also heats up the PC. The unused services like MSN Messenger, Google Desktop Search, QuickTime, wireless managers, etc should be shut down. Launching Windows Task Manager to get rid of anything not used in-flight is a good idea.
Hibernating is better than Suspending the system. It consumes more power in suspended mode. The instant switch is not worth the power consumed compared to the 30-60 seconds startup that is associated with hibernation.
Find the power saving mode with a 16-bit color mode, force the CPU into a power-saving mode, disable LAN port. All these can be found out at the control panel or through custom software provided by the manufacturer. If nothing works then manually force your screen into lower color modes.
Alarms settings should be done with as much as 10% of your battery still available. Conclusion Saving power is the best way to put less tax on the battery mechanism which surely adds to the life of the battery.
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