subject: How to Save Your Laptop Battery Life [print this page] I know how the life of your ibm thinkpad t23 laptop battery can be an important factor when considering a new laptop. Unfortunately, after a year of using the laptop regularly you will begin to notice the battery slowly having less and less life. This is inevitable and eventually you will have to replace the battery, but this can get expensive. So here are a few things you can do to try and save battery life on your laptop.
Use your battery. If you're like me and leave your laptop on the charger all the time while in use, your basically not allowing your ibm thinkad t43 battery to exercise its functions, allowing it to become lazy. After a while you may start to realize, when you need to actually use your battery, that it seems to have less and less life. Even if you have an outlet available, I recommend, once every few weeks, unplugging your laptop and allowing it to drain before plugging it back in.
Charging your laptop. This seems obvious, but you want to leave your laptop on its charger until you are leaving with it. If you take your laptop off it charger a few hours before you leave, it may not have a completely full charge, leaving you with less battery life. You can test this by charging your laptop completely before going to bed, take it off the charger and the next morning see if you have less battery life.
Adjust the power options. On PC's you can change the power settings to save some of your battery life. There are 3 options: High Performance, Power Saver and Balance. You can access these settings my going to your start menu and clicking on control panel. Here, you will click the Power Options icon; here you will be able to change these settings.
Your screen. The screen display takes up more than 40% of your batteries lifespan, so dim your laptops screen to a reasonable and still viewable setting, you might be surprised how much more battery life you gain. This is an easy setting to change. On your keyboard there are secondary keys that appear blue, you will want to find the keys that show a sun with an up and down arrow. Hold down the blue Fn key and tap the sun down key to dim your screen.
Remove any unused devices, such as CD/DVD or USB drives. Even if you are not using these, your laptop is taking power just knowing they are there, so by removing them, it no longer has to waste useful power.
WiFi. Your laptop is constantly sending out signals to connect or to try and connect to an Internet source. If you are not using the Internet, disable your connection until you need it, doing this can possibly save up to 30 minutes of ibm 40Y6799 battery life. You can test this with your laptop by turning off your WiFi settings with your laptop off the charger, check to see if your battery life changes. I did this and my time jumped from a remainder of 2 hours and 12 minutes to 2 hours and 38 minutes, gaining almost 30 minutes of battery life.
Go to sleep. If you are not using your laptop but need a quick startup let it go into sleep mode. The battery will still be used but it will save so much more then if you just let it run, but don't start it up again until you are ready to use it.
