Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Freeing Your Laptop from the Power Cord

You jealously eye them as they sit smuggly in coffee shops. At airport gates and in hotel lobbies, they taunt you. In every magazine ad you spot the big lie right away: Laptops, sitting there, not connected to an outlet.

YOUR laptop is always plugged in. You know it has a battery ...but it sure doesn't seem to last very long. You're forever choosing where to sit based on if your power cord will reach the nearest outlet. And that sad scramble, scanning the walls near people's feet, trying like mad to find some extra juice those times when you misjudged and ran out of gas early...? How come they never show THAT in the magazine ads?

Why don't other people's laptops need to be plugged in as often?


There are a few simple things you can do to help your laptop battery last longer. Learn to run your laptop like a TECHIE...


1. A Not so Bright Idea
Turn down your display brightness. Your laptop's screen uses more power than almost any other component. The less bright the screen, the longer the battery will last. On my own laptop, I've noticed an almost 30% increase in battery life by reducing the display brightness when it isn't plugged in. That 30% can mean the difference between finishing a spreadsheet and getting on your knees in public.

You can even configure your laptop so that it displays at full brightness when it is plugged in and automatically dimming when it is unplugged. (This is also nice because if your laptop accidentally becomes unplugged, you will notice right away.)


2. Get More Memory
If your laptop doesn't have enough RAM (memory), your hard drive activity light will be forever flickering like a firefly on crack. This is because your computer doesn't have enough memory for all of the programs you are running.

Even if you aren't "running any programs", the operating system itself is a collection of hundreds of tiny programs all chugging away in the background. When you don't have enough memory left to do something, the computer doesn't just stop. Instead it takes a chunk of memory you aren't using at the moment and stores it to the hard drive, freeing that memory up to run another program. When you need to run the program that was stored to the hard drive, it swaps another chunk of memory to the hard drive and restores the section you need back into your RAM. This is called "virtual memory". Your computer does this on the fly -- so fast you hardly notice -- but all that spinning of your hard drive takes a lot of power.

If you have more RAM (memory) your computer will have more room to run programs and there will be less need to keep saving things to your hard drive. My laptop came with 1GB of RAM. I was able to add another 1GB of RAM for under $50 and now the battery lasts approximately 20-30% longer. And it runs faster too!


3. Turn off your wireless
Maybe you are connected to a wireless network. Maybe you need to be connected to do whatever it is you are doing. Or maybe, just maybe, your wireless adapter is on and connected to a network -- or worse, it is on and SCANNING for a network, again and again -- guzzling extra power all the while. If you need to be on the Internet, keep the wireless on. But if you are working on a presentation or reviewing a spreadsheet, turn off your wireless. You can easily squeeze an extra 5 percent or more out of your battery by doing this.

Just following the steps above should buy you some breathing room -- up to 50 percent longer -- before you need to plug in the dreaded power cord.


TECHIES is the IT Department for Small Business in the Twin Cities. If you would like some more tips about how to get your technology to work like you know it should, give us a call at 612.333.TECH.

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