![]() (HP has instructions for how do to this on Windows 7 and Vista, as well as Windows XP, while Apple has instructions for Mac laptops on their site.) Then unplug your laptop, and set its power management settings to never turn off or lower the monitor brightness. Or else the meter might warn that you only have 2 minutes of battery life left and shut your laptop down, when it really has another 20 minutes remaining.įirst, charge your laptop's battery to full, and leave it that way for at least two hours. In your laptop, this can mean your laptop shuts down abruptly when the meter says you have 30 minutes left. You'd either run out of gas when you thought you had a quarter of a tank left, or you'd be filling up too frequently. Imagine if the gas gauge on your car dashboard was misreading how much gas you actually had in the tank. You can't undo those changes, but there is one common battery issue you can fix: In many laptops, the operating system's battery meter gets out of sync with how much juice the battery actually has. It loses power over time due to chemical reactions taking place in the battery, as it chugs along powering your laptop. You can't miraculously reconstitute your battery's capacity. (UPDATE- we originally recommended Battery Eater and while the program works great, their download site has been compromised and we are recommending an alternate program, Battery Bar downloadable from CNET.) These will compare your battery's current maximum capacity to how long it lasted when it was new. There are free downloads to do this job, like Battery Bar (for Windows PCs) or Coconut Battery (for Macs). First, you have to correctly gauge how much capacity has been lost. If your battery capacity has diminished, there are a few things you can do about it. Originally it may have had a run time of 3.5 hours, but after a year it'll run out of juice at 3 hours, even on a full charge. (A premium laptop's battery might last longer.) Every time you charge your battery, the total capacity of the battery is diminished. ![]() Most laptops use batteries that can last for 3-5 years, or about 1000 charges. Laptop battery wearing down? In this week's episode of Upgrade Your Life, Yahoo! News' Becky Worley shows us how to help batteries last longer.
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