Laptops. They are portable and let you to take your work with you. Plus, most laptops today deliver overall performance that can give even the most expensive and advanced desktops a run for their money.
It’s hard to imagine life without these technological wonders.
Gamers, students, business professionals, etc. — almost everyone uses a laptop nowadays. However, not everyone knows how to keep it in good shape. Good optimization and maintenance techniques can easily add a few more years to your machine’s and its battery’s longevity. Here are three optimization tips that you’ll want to keep in your arsenal.
Keep Your Laptop Cool
The construction of the chassis of laptops and, even more important, processor dissipation optimization are getting better. Despite that, the heat generated by your machine is still one of its biggest enemies to longevity. Not to mention it’s annoying if you use your laptop while resting on your lap.
What can you do about it? It’s simple. Grab a cooling base! It’s one of the best investments you can make for your laptop. And it’s a no-brainer, especially if we consider that the cost is not high. You can get a cooling base (the most basic one) for a little less than $20.
Aside from serving as a support base for your laptop, within the base is one or more USB-powered fans that will keep your laptop cool.
Battery Calibration
With each charge and discharge, the battery of our laptop or smartphone loses capacity. This is due to the chemical components contained in the batteries that doesn’t react well with the passage of time.
In light of that, calibrating your batteries (and this applies to most mobile devices not just laptops) approximately every two months or once month if you don’t use the laptop or smart phone often. Through calibration, your laptop or mobile device’s battery can be charged to 100 percent of their capacity.
Here’s how to do it:
- Charge your laptop to its max capacity and leave it plugged in about two hours.
- Next, use it until the battery is drained completely, and leave it in that state (do not charge it) for five hours or more.
- Finally, when we plug it in and recharge it fully, the capacity will be maximized.
Use Battery Optimizer
Users who travel a lot with their laptops know how unpleasant it is to run out of battery just when you need it the most. To avoid this and at the same time prolong battery life, using a program called Battery Optimizer can be of great help.
The first thing you have to do is to scan your PC for the programs and various system components (hardware, software, and attached peripherals) that uses your battery.
To do this, in the first window click “Run Diagnostics.” This shows a lot of useful information about your battery. The following window will indicate the laptop parts and peripherals that must be disconnected from the power supply.
Select “Quick Scan Mode” and click “Start Diagnosis.” While the program is performing the process, do not use the PC. When done, the analysis will show the most optimal results you can get from your battery. Next, click on “Optimize Battery Life.”
The following window will show various parameters that you can modify to increase the battery life. This could include adjusting brightness, closing processes that consume RAM, disconnect certain peripherals, and more. Beside each one of them, you are shown how much battery life you can save.
With everything ready, you can click on “Save Optimizations” for future use, or simply click “Perform Optimizations” to apply them immediately.
If you click on “Options,” you can load a profile you have saved, or leave everything as it was. For the latter, press the “Restore To Original Settings.”
These tricks weren’t so hard, were they? But simple as they seem, they go a long way in increasing the longevity of your laptop!
