Jerson’s Pad

If your laptop battery doesn’t last the way it used to. There are some simple steps to do before purchasing or replacing it with a new one.

1. Check if your notebook has a BIOS battery calibration feature.

ASUS laptop has one. All you need to do is run it from BIOS and leave running it until it completes its process.

2. Adjust your display’s brightness and contrast.

One of the biggest part of a laptop computer is it’s LCD display and one of the largest parts that consumes battery charge. Try to tune it down by adjusting the brightness and contrast to minimal but comfortable settings, not to dim and not too bright.

3. Turn off optional hardware.

Some optional hardware that can be turned off while not in use are Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and infrared. This can be toggled by using settings in your laptop, by software or by pressing shortcut buttons provided on your laptop panel.

If you have a lot of USB devices connected to your laptop remove them whenever possible or not in use.

4. Optimize Multimedia devices.

Remove DVD or CD disk on their drives when not in use.
Check if your CMOS boot settings always checks your CD-ROM drive for bootable disk, set it to boot from hard disk instead.
Playing music and games eats a lot of battery power; expect your battery to drain faster when doing playing games or music.

5. Minimize hard disk read write.

If you have a lot of scheduled task that includes several disk read and write like checking for viruses, defrag, auto updates. Try to set them to manual if possible.

Those are just some of the factors affecting your laptop battery draining fast than usual. Follow some or most of these tips to squeeze more life out of your laptop battery.

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Tags: Laptop, Notebook

This entry was posted on Monday, September 28th, 2009 at 10:49 am and is filed under Tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.