Calibrate It
You should always calibrate your battery at the very least once every three months. If you are someone who never fully drains your battery before plugging in the AC adapter you should calibrate it once a month.
Calibrating your laptops battery is very simple and just takes three steps.
1. Charge your battery to 100% full
2. Drain your battery completely till your computer automatically shuts off.
3. Fill up your battery again to 100% full
That’s it your done, pretty much what you did was empty your battery completely to get rid of bad recharge cells and completely fill it up all the way again so its like brand new, well almost.
Another easy way to save your battery is to not even use it. If you are someone who has their laptop just sitting on their desk everyday and always has it plugged in to the AC adapter then just remove the battery.
Dial down the brightness when running off of a battery. This is one of the easiest ways to extend your battery life and you can see an extended battery life of up to 15 to 30 minutes.
Use Hibernate mode over Standby mode. Standby keeps the notebook’s state in memory and uses some power, while hibernate stores the machine’s state to disk and uses almost no power.
Turn off your Wi-Fi or your Bluetooth when you are not using them. When you are not online be sure to toggle off your Wi-Fi and your Bluetooth. These items are constantly sending out signals that are using a considerable amount of battery usage. When these are off you will notice a significant difference in battery life.
Do not download large files while on your battery. You can download that movie onto your computer some other time and do not allow those pesky windows updates to download while you are working either. Almost all updates to programs can wait till you get back on the AC adapter.
If you combine all of these you can expect to see a large difference in your battery life, but do not expect your battery to last forever. No battery lasts forever and eventually you will have to replace it just like your car battery. Just make sure to store you battery properly also. Never keep it in a car on a hot day, or out in the snow. Obviously you would not do either of those, but pretty much just try to keep it around 68 degrees to 77 degrees with a 30 to 50 percent charge.
Good post. I never knew I needed to do that to my battery. I noticed I wasn’t getting a full recharge, this might just fix my problem.
Thanks Mike for the research.