10 Tips to Increase Battery Life of Laptops

Everyone wants to use their batteries for as long as possible and in a way that is least stressful.The following tips will help you to enhance and increase the back-up time as well as shelf life of your laptop batteries.These tips will greatly increase the battery life of you laptops and they are relatively simple to apply.
First of all you need to understand that battery capacity itself cannot be increased.Batteries normally decrease in back-up time by 4-10% per year, so dont get offended by the reduced capacity of your old battery.
However Their are ways in which we can use the available battery capacity in the most efficient possible way.

1. Never keep your Laptop on A/C power when not in use.This will overcharge the battery and cause irreversible damage in the form of reduced backup time.(while most of the new battery chargers automatically turn off the charge when battery is full some old ones keep on charging the battery)
2. Use "Minimal Power Management" Scheme when running on batteries.This greatly maximizes the backup time.To enable minimal power management scheme go to control panel and select power options their you will find a list of power schemes so select minimal power management from there.
3. Reduce the brightness and contrast of your LCD screen and use a low display resolution as it will reduce the burden on your video card.while lowering brightness will cause the lcd to consume less power.
4. Keep the temperature of your notebook low. Working on beds and pillows increases heat build up by restricting air flow. Heat build up puts extra stress on electronic components and causes the electrodes in battery to react with electrolyte permanently lowering capacity.cooling fans inside laptop also use extra energy when working in high temperatures.
5. Mute system volume and avoid using sound.
6. Disconnect any extra peripherals or USB devices e.g mouse attached to you laptop, they also consume valuable battery power quickly.
7. Disable any system devices e.g wireless modems or card readers you normally do not use.They can be disabled from the device manager in the control panel.
8. Fully charge and discharge your battery after every 30 charges.This keeps the battery healthy and running.
9. Use an extended battery like the one pictured above. They are expensive but they deliver nearly double the back-up time.
10. Use an adjustable voltage charger.a voltage of 4.2v per cell increases capacity and a voltage of 3.9 ensures long life. Higher charge voltages boost battery capacity but compromise on life and saftey.