Brightness: how low can you go? Without any question

Brightness: how low can you go? Without any question

the fastest way 310-6322 to suck the life out of a battery is leaving your brightness high. Turn it down as low as you possibly can without needing to up your glasses prescription. On my Vaio, I can select from one of 8 levels. During one test, at brightness level 3 my system reported 60% full, with 3:52 (all times are hours:minutes) of life to go. I switched up to level 5 and in 17 minutes of use, I was down to 52% full, with 3:06 to go. In other words, 17 minutes used 46 minutes worth of D5318 (all other variables were held constant). You can even be so bold as to lower your brightness all the way down when sitting idle for a minute or two (for example, if you are writing a long blog post and pause to clarify your thoughts before typing).

Don’t use any external devices. USB and PC-Cards (aka PC-MCIA) use your battery to function, even when you aren’t using them! Have an EVDO card or maybe a USB mouse? Remove them if you can. Even a memory card reader in your PC-MCIA slot uses power G5260 just by being in there. The effect varies based on the type of device, but even a few minutes here and there (as you’ll see) add up significantly.

Single-task, not multi-task. The more you are doing at the same time with your PC, the more memory and CPU usage increases. Both of which directly use up battery. Close any applications you aren’t using, even the small ones. When doing some experimentation, I found it more efficient to run a single application at a time, then close it and open a new G5266 one when ready to move on. While your hard drive uses the battery too, if you are doing anything ‘productive’ you are probably hitting the drive on a regular (even if infrequent) basis anyway.

Keep it cool. You can take a page out of the extreme gamer’s handbooks, and have your system perform more optimally by keeping it cool. Make sure your air vents (inflow and outflow) aren’t blocked by anything, which often occurs by poorly positioning your notebook on your lap (which is known to have some other side-effects too, by the way). Heavy CPU and memory use all contribute to heat as well, hence my comment Latitude CPi on multi-tasking above.