How to increase the life of a laptop's battery

As a self pronounced computer geek, I have a laptop, and when I first got it, I didn't fully understand how the computer used the laptop battery power, so after looking into it, I have come up with a various amount of ways to improve the overall lifespan of your laptops battery.

1. Unplug any unused peripheral devices. These may be external hard drives, flash drives, or a web cam. Basically, if you have anything your not using in any of your USB ports, unplug it, as it takes up battery even if not in use.

2. If you can, dim your screen. All laptops, or at least ones that I've seen, carry a function where you can dim the back light on your screen. Lower the light, lower the amount of electricity it uses.

3. If your not using the your WiFi, turn off the card. This is another feature that many laptops have. Its function is to disable the WiFi card in your laptop, making it use less battery. For my laptop, I press [Function] + F2.

4. Try not to use the disc drive. The disc drive is often times the most energy consuming piece of hardware in your computer when its being used, due to it spinning the entire time your using it.

5. Don't keep your laptop on for extended periods of time. Even if its plugged in, the battery is still giving off charge, slowly decomposing the amount of electricity it can store.

6. Avoid using a large of amount of programs. This builds up the CPU's "stress" and requires it to use an excess amount of electricity.

7. Keep it clean! Defrag your computer and remove unnecessary files! This makes it so the hard drive doesn't have to do nearly as much work searching and using your files.

8. Keep your laptop cold. When computers overheat, its not only bad for the components in the laptop itself, but its pretty rough on the battery also.

9. When leaving your laptop on, at least hibernate it. And no, that doesn't man lock the desktop or put it on standby. I mean hibernate. Any of the other choices, and your computer is still using up quite a bit of battery.

10. Adjust your power properties. On all the laptops I've dealt with, there is an option, often times wherever you see you notebook battery life meter, where you can adjust the amount of time that is require before your laptop begins its screen saver, stand by, or hibernate.

I leave these wise words of battery advice to you, and hope that this article helped in some way, either to you or a friend.