I am on the planes a decent amount of the time (100,000 miles by late May)

I am on the planes a decent amount of the time (100,000 miles by late May)

and tend to spend a chunk of my flights using mydell laptop battery. Most of the time it’s productive, but it can also include a DVD or the occasional game (either Nethack or Battle for Middle-Earth 2, which are obviously similar). When I was a-hunting for a laptop, battery life was a key criterion in my selection process, as was weight. While I like my Vaio VGN SZ-160P, the standard battery was lasting about 3 hoursInspiron 6000 (the extended life clocks in under six hours before my tweaks), not enough for the SFO-JFK route (now switching to SFO-EWR as a default due to Manhattan traffic, which is a huge bummer because United’s P.S. flights have standard AC outlets on board).

So I did a lil’ Googlin’ for tips on extending battery life, and I found them all pretty, well, lacking.Inspiron 9300 Stuff like “don’t try to do real-time 3d rendering” or “fully charge up your battery before flying.” One of them even said “buy an extra battery.” Not exactly helpful (Sony’s tips are in the picture on the right). The most common tip that I’ve found truly deceptive is on disabling wireless: many claim it makes a huge impact to disable it, but personally I’ve only noticed a minor difference. I do Inspiron 9400 in fact disable it (and Bluetooth) but on my Vaio the difference was about 10 minutes over 3 hours (but as I state below, it all adds up).

Alas, I’ve gone and done a lot of experimenting and have a list of my tips to really maximize battery life for my laptop.

Key to this process is having some good methodology. While testing, I kept a plain text file on my Desktop (creatively called “battery.txt”) tracking the real clock as well as Windows’ expected battery life. The problem with the Windows tool, is it really just tells you the current state of the battery based on the current system activity. This means if you start with 3 hours remaining 310-6321 then spend 30 minutes doing something that rapidly consumes the battery, you’ll be down to 2 or less. In other words, you need to track the actual history/lifespan of your battery if you want to get the best information out of your system. You can check out my little tracking file for inspiration.