Extending battery life on mobile devices

[turion64]

Ok so i am not the first poster , but who cares anyway.!!:D
I do have a new laptop : Turion 64 ;512MB RAM :80GiB :128MB pci-express ATI x700; 15.4 wxga;wi-fi,usb2 & IEEE1394.
It rocks for office apps as well as games, it also does a prety good job using Adobe Premier 6.5 to edit video/film.
The built in dual format dual layer dvd burner is also a boon.
I would like any tips, advice on how i can max the battery time.
I plug it in at the wall and always leave the battery fully charged but ultimatley out of the laptop as i have in the past fried the battery because i left it in all the time .
Any scary stories on frying the battery????? posts always read

keep it 64
D

[glc]

In battery mode, use the most aggressive power management you can stand.

[Statica]

It depends on how exactly you use your battery too
* always charge a new laptop battery to the max without using it.. its usually a longer than usual charge
* if the laptop is on charge (desktop replacement); then remove the battery after a full charge. Remember to discharge and recharge every few weeks or so
* if you use it on hybrid .. plugged in sometimes; mobile sometimes .. try to let it run down before recharging it; frequent stop gap charges dont usually equate to long battery life
* to extend battery life for working conditions .. learn to use the power management. Most laptops come with pretty powerful strategies especially if your battery has a pure mobility processor .. learn to use it
* learn to use suspend to ram and hibernate
* learn to use hardware profiles and selective and quick disabling of hardware you dont need to use. I see people use the button for the wireless radio on most laptops, as a way to "conserve" battery power as they assume it turns off wifi .. it doesnt! All it does is turn off the antenna .. the wifi card is active and is quite happily searching for a network without an antenna. While typing a document on a plane, you really dont need your processor running away at max; feel free to reduce it.
* while it makes for a good marketting campaign, sitting on a park bench under the sun does not make good sense for battery power :) Heat always reduces battery efficiency, also reduces the need for the cooling fans to kick in constantly

Am sure there are more that will come up

[ComputerNut]

My new Acer uses a 1.73 Centrino, so it has effective power managment. And like most laptops nowadays, it comes with one of those power management programs. When my batteries are fully charged and I dont need to use it for that session for more than 2 hours, i just blast all the settings, and even despite that I still get almost 2.5 hours out of it! if I lower the settings to absolute minimum, I get a 5-6 hours!

[Stuey]

I have two batteries for my Compaq laptop which have lives of 30 seconds and 5 minutes. I stop using the laptop about two years ago, but this fact still bothers me.

Just a suggestion, but maybe there should be a sticky on extending battery life, with Statica's post at the very beginning.

[Statica]

Keep in mind that any rechargeable battery has a limited lifecycle determined by the number of charges it will take. It is inevitable that they will lose their ability to hold charge as long as they once used to.

Re: stickying the thread - I'll let this thread run its course, and then collate the contributions from members into a sticky till the information becomes obsolete.

Also some suggestions for further contributions that relate to battery life that we could add on are - buying a replacement battery for your laptop.

* Try looking at alternative vendors that sell compatible batteries for your system. Usually, the more popular your mfger/model the more the alternatives there are for choices on battery mfgers. It's not to say that they are better than the OEM that put its name on your laptop; but its a worthy consideration.
* Usually there are also options to the batteries you can use. As a background - the batteries that are used in laptops are actually battery "packs" - meaning multiple "batteries" or "cells" bunched together to form a pack. This means that you can sometimes find choices for more "cells" per pack. This, of course, increases the amt of time the battery will supply charge and will increase the number of discharge cycles, but usually comes at a weight and price premium. For ex. for a dell latitude 100L an 8cell battery is a 65whr one & usually lasts about 300 discharge cycles and is about 1.03lb; while a 12cell battery is about 500 discharge cycles and weighs about 1.35 lb for 96whr .. the difference in cost .. about $20.

[thefultonhow]

One thing that hasn't been mentioned so far -- screen brightness has a huge effect on battery life. From my informal observations, leaving the screen at full brightness as opposed to minimum or one notch from the bottom can easily halve battery life.

[kram 2.0]

On top of reducing the screen brightness, I observed that turning off Wi-Fi makes a good difference - while it may seem like a small thing, the tablets Centrino Tablets I use go for several more minutes as a result of no-Wi-Fi.

kram

[Statica]

Or of disabling the inactive network devices and having only the active ones enabled. As I said before; using appropriate hardware profiling (System Properties > Hardware Profiles)