I love my laptop computer. I take it with me everywhere. Sure I can do most of the things I do on my laptop on my cel phone, but my cel phone screen does not give me the visual impact that my laptop does. I want to see the full screen. The only real problem I have is that my laptop battery runs out fairy quickly, and I am not the only one who complains about this problem.

The average laptop rechargeable battery life is 78 minutes. That gives you barely over an hour until it is time to find an outlet you can snag. Try that on a commercial cross country flight. Unless you are in business class or better, you are pretty much hosed.

That 78 minutes is an average and can either be extended or shortened depending on what you are doing with your computer. If you are playing games, or watching a DVD or streaming video, you will use up more battery than if you are simply checking email. With that in mind, there are a few things you can do to extend the length of time you go between charges.

One of the easiest things you can do is to lower the brightness of your screen. The brighter your display, the more batter you will use. Obviously, you need to keep your display bright enough so that you can see what you are doing. And some laptops automatically dim when you move to battery power. But if yours does not, or even if it does, it is a good practice to keep your monitor dimmer when you are on battery power. You will also want to lower your screen resolution. And if you can limit your use of graphics, that too will help your battery last longer.

External devices drain battery, this includes your USB mouse too. Try to limit their use to when you are running off the battery, and never charge other devices from your laptop unless it is plugged into an outlet itself. These devices rapidly drain your battery.

Remember, when working on battery power, multi-tasking is bad. You should reduce the number of programs that are active in the background as well as limiting what you are using. When you are operating on battery power it is always a good idea to shut down anything you do not need.

Save the gaming for sometime when you are near an outlet. Use your battery to do things like check email and use your basic programs such as a word processing or spreadsheet program, and always one at a time if you can do so. If you are using programs that have auto-save enabled, turn this off. Just make sure to save regularly, or you may lose your work if your battery shuts down.

Using hibernate instead of standby will gain you a bit of battery time too. If you have a newer computer you can manage your power options in your control panel; select max battery option.

Finally, if your batter no longer holds a charge well, you can buy a new battery, however you will probably not gain much time between charges. Or you may want to consider buying a new laptop. There are some laptops which promise hours of battery time. Just make sure to do your research ahead of time to get the computer that will best suit your needs.

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