You likely spend more time on your laptop than with your significant other, your dog or — at the very least — your plants. So there’s no reason you shouldn’t treat it with the same tender loving care. Here are a few tips to ensure that your gadget’s battery has a long and happy life.
If you’ve got a laptop with a really old battery that drains in a few minutes after a full charge, there’s not much you can do to make that old thing last much longer—you’ll probably want to replace the battery before you do anything else. For everybody else, these tips can help you keep your battery working at peak efficiency.
What Drains Your Battery?
In order to help maximize your battery life, it’s important to first understand what drains the power from your laptop battery, and in a modern laptop it’s pretty simple—the LCD panel is the biggest culprit by far. Microsoft’s Windows 7 Engineering
blog has put together a very useful chart that helps show you exactly what percentage each component will drain, which helps us know where to start when trying to maximize the battery life.
Tweak Your Power Plan Settings
Squeezing every drop of juice out of a lithium ion battery (the type used in today’s laptops) strains and weakens it. Doing this once or twice won’t kill the battery, but the cumulative effect of frequently emptying your battery will shorten its lifespan.
(There’s actually an exception to this rule–a circumstance where you should run down the battery all the way. I’ll get to that later.)
The good news: You probably can’t run down the battery, anyway–at least not without going to a lot of trouble to do so. Most modern laptops are designed to shut down before the battery is empty.
In fact, Vista and Windows 7 come with a setting for just this purpose. To see it, click Start, type power, and select Power Options. Click any one of the Change plan settings links, then the Change advanced power settings link. In the resulting dialog box, scroll down to and expand the Battery option. Then expand Critical battery level. The setting will probably be about 5 percent, which is a good place to leave it.
XP has no such native setting, although your laptop may have a vendor-supplied tool that does the same job.
Myth: You should never recharge your battery all the way.
Adjust the Screen Brightness
Since we’ve already shown that the LCD screen is the biggest drag on your battery life, the quickest way to save your battery life is to use your laptop’s hardware buttons to control the screen brightness—most laptops require holding down the function key and using the brightness keys, and turning it down as far as you can (while still visible) is a good idea. It may seem like an obvious choice, but it’s worth emphasizing at the top of the list for one reason: Of everything you can tweak to improve your battery life, this one change alone is at the top of the list of tweaks that can dramatically improve your battery life.
Make sure that your power plan is set to turn off the display quickly when your laptop is idle, and don’t use any fancy screensavers that overuse the graphics capabilities of your laptop. Many web sites tell you to disable Aero to squeeze more battery life, and it’s true that you might get a very small bit of extra life, a couple of minutes at the very most—you will be much better off adjusting the screen brightness and using aggressive screen blanking settings.
SOLUTION:- Adjust your monitor's brightness and contrast (MIRROR LINK)
Take Care of Your Battery by Avoiding Heat
Laptop batteries are always going to slowly lose their ability to charge over time, but when a laptop is constantly overheating or used in a very hot environment, your battery is going to die very quickly. Photo by JustinLowery
Today’s laptops use Lithium batteries instead of nickel, but there’s a lot of incorrect information out there about how to charge or drain your batteries, so let’s set the record straight: Nickel batteries required being fully drained before a recharge to optimize your battery life, but Lithium batteries are the opposite—you do not need to fully discharge it before recharging, and in fact, if you fully deplete a lithium battery and don’t recharge for a while, it can become incapable of holding a charge.
You’ll also want to make sure that your battery is not always fully charged—Wikipedia points out that if your lithium battery is fully charged all the time, you will lose up to 20% of your capacity every year, no matter what you do. Make sure to discharge the battery sometimes, and if you spend most of your time plugged in at a desk, you would be better off running the battery down to half, and then simply removing the battery and storing it in a cool place. You can use Hibernate mode to save exactly what you were doing while still shutting down the laptop completely.
SOLUTION:- How To Fix An Overheating Laptop (Mirror Link)
Keep your fans clean!
Make sure your computer vents are clear and clean. Check out your laptop mfg website for details on how to properly clean your air vents. Clogged air vents can not only make your laptop inefficient, but it can cause permanent damage to your computer.
SOLUTION:- How to Clean the Dust Out of Your Laptop (Mirror Link)
Don’t get too attached.
When you plug your laptop in for the first time, you should make sure to fully charge it once to calibrate it. But after that, aim to keep it between 40 and 80 percent. Apple’s customer care says you should do this to “keep the electrons in it moving occasionally.” Wired has a better explanation of why here. But the bottom line is, doing this can help prolong your battery life by as much as four times.
I know that’s easier said than done. Just remember to keep an eye on your battery percentage (usually shown in a corner of your screen) throughout the day. If you leave your laptop at home, then shut it down, close it and keep it unplugged on a desk, not a couch.
Keep the air moving!
Contrary to the name “laptop” it should not go directly on your lap, a pillow, blanket or anything else that can suffocate your vents /laptop. Always use your laptop on a solid surface, if not a table how about a hard back book or a piece of wood!
You should also fully charge
and discharge your computer’s battery at least once a month. Set a reminder on your phone or something. You forked over what I assume to be a ton of money for this thing, so paying attention to it once a month shouldn’t be a problem.
Update, update, update.
Most companies are constantly looking for ways to improve battery life via software updates. In fact, it was one of the main things Apple touted in its OS X Mavericks release last year. You may fear change, but change can extend your battery life. So make sure you have the latest software installed on your computer.
Give It a Rest
Kill Background Processes and Services
Runaway system processes can do more than just kill your PC’s performance—they can also kill your battery as well. You’ll want to make sure that you close any background applications you don’t need to be running while you are on battery power, and disable any automated updaters, scheduled tasks, and especially search indexing.
Prime targets for removal are things like Windows desktop gadgets, and all of those applications that hide themselves in your system tray. It’s time for a cleanup, so disable or uninstall any application running in your system tray that you don’t actually need. (Only uninstall if you’re still plugged in—no use wasting extra battery life on that now.) It’s not just good for your battery life, it’s a good practice in general.
If you want an easier way to toggle settings on or off, you can use previously mentioned utility Aerofoil to help you automatically disable Aero Glass, switch between power plans, mute the sound, and even disable the sidebar, all with a tiny, lightweight icon sitting in the system tray.
Use Hibernate Mode When Possible
Using Hibernate mode instead of Sleep allows your laptop to completely power down and use zero power, so if you aren’t going to be using your laptop for another hour or more, put it into Hibernate mode instead of sleep mode, which still uses a trickle of battery life to keep everything in memory.
One of the other benefits of using Hibernate mode that many people don’t consider is that there are any number of ways that your laptop can be accidentally woken out of sleep mode—for instance, a scheduled task for an application that pulls your laptop out of sleep mode to do backups, or just an unruly device that triggers the laptop to wake up. If you are using Hibernate mode, nothing can wake the laptop other than the power button.
Special Note
- If you’re going to be working exclusively on AC power for a week or more, remove the battery first.
- Otherwise, you’ll be wearing out the battery–constantly charging and discharging it–at a time when you don’t need to use it at all. You’re also heating it up (see “Keep It Cool,” above).
- You don’t want it too empty when you take it out. An unused battery loses power over time, and you don’t want all the power to drain away, so remove it when it’s at least half-charged.
- Never remove the battery while the computer is on, or even in standby or sleep mode; doing so will crash your system and possibly damage your hardware. Even inserting a battery into a running laptop can damage the system. So only remove or reinsert the battery when the laptop is completely off or hibernating.
- If you’ve never removed your laptop’s battery and don’t know how, check your documentation. (If you don’t have it, you can probably find it online.) The instructions generally involve turning the laptop upside-down and holding down a button while you slide out the battery.
Myth: Refrigerate your battery.
Turn off your laptop
At last If you are not going to use your laptop for more than 5 hours, turn it off. Not only does this save energy, but it will save your laptop too! It clears old memory items from your daily tasks, it helps reduce the wear and tear on your laptop and battery overall! So turn it off!
"Unique Facts" a blog by Akshat 
Great article, (Y)