Expanding life span of laptop battery
Expanding life span of laptop battery
Expanding life span of laptop battery
Q: My wife read in one of her ladies' magazines that the way to extend the life span of your dell laptop battery is to use the battery only when you don't have an available power source to plug it in to. Almost all of the time, I use my laptop at home and don't really need the battery as a power source. Will removing the battery actually extend the battery's life span, or is it negligible?
A: Removing the battery when you don't need it will, indeed, extend the life of the battery. Many users, however, see that as too great an inconvenience for a relatively modest gain in battery life. (The actual gain varies quite a bit, and I haven't seen any kind of firm estimate.)
If you're looking for ways to extend battery life, quite a number of steps will help as much as or more than removing your battery.
Four that will yield the best results are: Turn down the brightness on your display. Most notebooks do this automatically when running on HP laptop battery, but you can turn the brightness down even further. Fact is, lighting the screen chews up a lot of energy.
Minimize use of the CD/DVD drive.
Shut off your wireless adapter when you don't need it.
Shut down applications running in background.
You can also disable unused ports, such as the VGA, Ethernet and USB ports.
You probably won't want to switch off ports even if you use them infrequently, however, because they don't draw a whole lot of battery power and it's a pain to plug something in and have it not work if you forgot to switch it back on. You switch ports on and off, by the way, in the Device Manager, which you'll find in the Control Panel.
Q: My PC keeps disconnecting from the Internet when it feels like it. It usually does so when it comes out of sleep or low-power mode, but there is no pattern. Some days there is no problem and other days it won't stay connected.
Today, for the first time it disconnected while I was working on it. It is more than five years old. It is also connected to the modem by an AC adapter. It didn't do this when I first bought it, of course, and it seems to be getting worse.
A: You don't mention what kind of connection to the Internet you have. Are you on cable? DSL? A dial-up connection?
The most likely cause of your interruptions, especially if you're on a dial-up connection, is loss of signal strength from the service provider. Contact the folks at your service provider and tell them what's happening. They can lead you through a troubleshooting procedure to determine whether the problem is inside your home or outside.
Q: I often see scary screens on my Dell Studio XP after Microsoft updates occur (not each week, but probably it averages once each month). Windows will not boot and insists on going through its auto-recovery process. This caused great panic for me the first time a couple months back. Now, I simply expect it and let Windows do its thing. Once the recovery process is complete the computer applications and peripherals always seem to work fine, but I worry about the day they won't. Have you heard of others with this recurring issue? Is it likely there will be a long-term issue?
A: I'd definitely contact Dell support. The computer should not be going through an auto-recovery process that frequently, and there's nothing about Windows updates that would cause it to do so.
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