If you are a laptop owner and you use your laptop outside of your home, you probably expect it to work as long as possible on one battery charge. I know that battery life was one of the main criteria when I was looking to buy my first laptop few years ago. You don’t want to drag your AC adapter everywhere and sometimes you won’t find a power point to plug it in. I’ve been lucky, because my LG laptop has a decent battery and it holds its charge for over one hour even after 3 years of use.

Some people are not that lucky and their laptop batteries empty their juice in a very short time, and the laptop doesn’t even have to be very old. The worst case I saw is in one of my friend’s HP laptops, which is only a year old. The battery held its charge for 1 minute! Yes, just ONE minute! Needless to say, he had to replace it as this malfunction is not covered by warranty.

If you want to make sure your battery is used as efficiently and as long as possible on one charge, please take a look at some of these tips:

1. Turn off devices and programs that you don’t use all the time, for example your wireless card, bluetooth connection and remove all icons from the taskbar that you don’t use regularly.

2. Stay out of extreme temperatures. Do not use your laptop when it’s very hot or cold.

3. Let your laptop save the power: make sure the settings in the Power Options (in Control Panel) are set to either Laptop/Portable, or Maximum Battery Life or a similar option. Also read your laptop manual to see what is recommended regarding power consumption and saving battery power.

4. Carry a spare, fully charged battery with you when you travel. Better safe than sorry!

5. In extreme cases, you just have to buy a new battery if the old one doesn’t hold its charge any more.

Some people take out the battery out of the laptop while it runs on AC power (cable), but based on my research this does not help the battery to ‘live’ longer. In fact, it’s recommended that the battery is connected at all times and is always fully charged, even when you are using the cable.