I travel constantly for business and maintaining optimal battery life from my laptop and cell phones is important to me. Like many business people, my life is digital now. If my laptop’s not powered up or my cell phone is out of juice, I’m stuck reading a novel or watching the movie. That’s why I believe it’s important for business travelers to make sure they optimize the battery potential for their digital devices.
The basics of optimizing battery longevity are fairly standard—turn down the display brightness, turn off unused devices (such as your wireless connection), and reduce the hard drive activity. Those will all help users get more life from a battery charge
To get maximum life from your battery over the long haul, you want to make sure your condition the battery. When you first buy a PC, charge the battery fully, then run the laptop on the battery until it’s discharged completely, and then recharge it to 100%. That initial power cycling will help condition the battery.
It’s generally not necessary to completely discharge batteries on a regular basis, though I do it about once a month with my laptops. However, it’s a good idea to make sure you do charge your batteries to 100% when you are charging.
