When Travelling

• Turn Down Your Screeen Brightness - Screen brightness is not a big deal yet it takes away a lot of battery power that can be put to better use (like playing games). This is very easy to do. All you’ll need to do in microsoft windows Vista is go to Control Panel–>Hardware & Sound–>Power Options and then on the left sidebar, click Adjust the display brightness. Here you can also tell the computer when to turn off the display and power off depending if you’re plugged in or not.

• Adjust the Computer Performance - Depending on what you’re doing while travelling, you might be able to sacrifice some performance to save some power. Microsoft Windows Vista has three plans that you can utilize: Power Saver, Balanced, and High Performance. I use Balanced most of the time, but there are times when I use the other two. You can tailor each of these plans to best suit your needs, but the one you should be focusing on is the Power Saver. Configure it so you’re using the least you can.

• If you have Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, turn it off. In most cases, you don’t need either of these because we have the Blackberry/Apple iPhone to do quick checks of email and such. It can be a real energy saver and can be as easy as flicking a switch off.
• One secret a lot of people don’t know or might know and not really act on it, is the fact that the CD/DVD drive takes much more power then if you download and watch it directly. Now I’m not encouraging downloading from illegal sources, what I’m saying is you should take this into consideration when you go on your next trip.

New Lease on Life

The reason my laptop has very little battery life is I now have it plugged in 24/7. This destroys the laptop battery and speeds up the process of aging because then the battery doesn’t have the chance to discharge so it loses it’s ability to hold a charge.