Category: NEWS

With so many phones and tablets not supplied with USB chargers these days, it’s possible that your current charger isn’t charging your phone or tablet as fast as it could be. Here’s how to charge your phone or tablet faster, even if it doesn’t support Qualcomm Quick Charge.

You’ve probably noticed that your phone or tablet will charge much slower when it’s connected to a PC or laptop’s USB port than when it is to a mains power adaptor. And you may have noticed your phone will charge faster when connected to the charger that came with your tablet. That’s because different chargers have different power outputs.

While a PC’s USB port is specified at 2.5W for USB 1.0 and 2.0 and 4.5W for USB 3.0 (so always use a USB 3.0 port in preference to USB 1.0 or 2.0 when available), a phone charger might be rated at 5W and a tablet charger 10W, for example.

We calculate the wattage by multiplying the current (the number of amps) and the voltage. So, if your charger is specified at 5V, 1A, it can supply 5W. If it is specified at 5V, 2A it can supply 10W.

How to charge your smartphone or tablet faster: Can I use a phone charger with a tablet; can I use a tablet charger with a phone? 

You can use any USB charger with any phone or tablet, with the only caveat that if there isn’t sufficient power available you may find your device won’t charge – this is often the case with iPads, which will not charge from a PC’s standard USB port.

Note that your device will draw only the power it requires. If you plug a 10W charger into a phone that accepts only 5W, it will still draw just 5W and won’t charge any faster than it would with a lower-specified charger.

However, many phones and most tablets will accept a higher input. Check the spec of your phone and your charger now to see whether you could be benefitting from faster charging.

How to charge your phone or tablet faster: What else can I do? 

Several tips are often bandied around that claim to allow for faster charging. One of those is to remove its case. We’re not convinced by the success of this tip, although you could argue that by avoiding excessive heat build-up you will prolong the life of your device’s battery, allowing it to operate at maximum performance for longer.

Another potentially useful tip, if you can bear to go offline for an hour or two, is to put your phone or tablet either into Flight mode or switch it off during charging. This may charge your device quicker because it isn’t busy doing any other tasks that would otherwise place a drain on the battery.

How to charge your iPad or iPhone faster from a Mac 

This tip is Apple-specific, and applies only to iDevices connected to an Apple Mac or MacBook’s USB port. Whereas Macs with USB 2.0 ports offer 2.5W of power, and those with USB 3.0 ports 4.5W of power, Apple claims that one of those USB 3.0 ports is able to offer 5.5W – which means using this will be comparable to using the 5W charger that came with your iPhone (but not the 10W charger that came with your iPad).

Note that this is possible only when the iDevice is the first Apple device plugged into the computer. If you have an Apple wired keyboard or mouse you will need to remove these, hook up your iPhone or iPad, and then reconnect the keyboard and mouse. This won’t work if you’re running Windows through Boot Camp.

For the most efficient charging from a PC’s USB port, make sure the computer is powered on and the screen is awake. If you’re using a laptop’s USB port, keep it plugged into the mains.

How to charge your phone faster with Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0 (& upcoming Quick Charge 3.0)

Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0 is a next-gen fast-charging technology for phones and tablets running certain Snapdragon processors. In Qualcomm’s own lab tests, it found a Quick Charge 2.0-enabled device with a 3300mAh battery was able to reach 60 percent capacity in 30 minutes; using a standard 5W phone charger just 12 percent charge was achieved in the same amount of time.

Qualcomm has recently announced Quick Charge 3.0, which will begin appearing in its chips in 2016. That means devices running the Snapdragon 820, 620, 618, 617 and 430 processors will benefit. Quick Charge 3.0 improves charging efficiency and reduces charging time so that 80 percent is possible in just 35 minutes.

In order to use Qualcomm Quick Charge you must use an adaptor that has built-in support for it. That may be the charger that came with your device; we’ve also tried a couple of Quick Charge car chargers (see our Choetech and Tronsmart reviews) and a Quick Charge power bank.

Hydrogen batteries – how hydrogen could charge your iPhone for a week

The alternative to faster charging is to provide batteries that last longer, and hydrogen could be a possible solution. We’ve already reviewed the Upp Fuel Cell power bank, but found it very expensive, big and impractical; now innovators are looking to place that tech inside phones.

Batteries are one of tech’s most boring subjects… until your phone, tablet or laptop dies. Here are our top battery tips and tricks to get the best battery life you can.

While most of us live in fear of a fading phone battery when we’re out and about, we don’t worry too much about that battery’s eventual lifespan (probably between three and five years). But there are ways to keep your battery in tip-top shape for a long and fruitful life.

Batteries do not enjoy eternal life. Most smartphone manufacturers say their devices rate their batteries at 300-500 cycles. Apple claims that its laptop batteries reach 80 percent of their original capacity after 1,000 charges.

After this point batteries aren’t able to hold as much electricity and will power your device for increasingly shorter periods of time. See: Best smartphones

So here’s some tips to extend your battery’s lifespan, be that in an iPhone, Android phone, Windows phone, tablet, or laptop.

The big questions about how to re-charge a battery is whether you should let it run to zero before re-charging to 100 percent. One reason why people are unsure is something they’ve heard of called the battery “memory effect”.

At what percentage should i charge my phone?

The rule with Li-ion batteries is to keep them 50 percent or more most of the time. When it drops below 50 percent top it up a little if you can. A little a few times a day seems to be the optimum to aim for.

But don’t charge it all the way to 100 percent . It won’t be fatal to your battery if you do a full recharge – most of us are forced to do this every now and again in emergencies. But constantly doing a full recharge will shorten the battery’s lifespan.

So a good range to aim for when charging a Li-ion battery is from about 40- to 80 percent in one go. Try not to let the battery drop below 20 percent.

When should I do a full battery charge?

Experts recommend that you do a full zero to 100 percent battery recharge (a “charge cycle”) maybe once a month only. This recalibrates the battery – a bit like restarting your computer, or, for humans, going on holiday! The same goes for laptops, by the way.

Should I charge my phone overnight?

Most modern smartphones are clever enough to stop charging when full, so there isn’t a great risk in leaving your phone charging overnight. But some experts recommend you remove the phone from a case if charging for a long time, as a case could lead to over heating – which Lithium-ion batteries do not like (see below).

Should I use fast charging?

Many Android phones have a feature that allows for fast charging, often referred to as Qualcomm Quick Charge or, in Samsung’s case, Adaptive Fast Charging – there are others.

These phones have special code usually located in a chip known as the Power Management IC (PMIC) that communicates with the charger you are using and requests that it send power at a higher voltage.

The iPhone 6 doesn’t feature fast charging, but its Qualcomm PMIC is smart enough to recognise when you use a higher-amp charger (like the one you get with the iPad), and that’s a good thing because fast charging will heat up that Li-ion battery and cause it increased wear and tear.

For the same reason, you should never leave your phone in a hot car, on the beach or next to the oven. A hot battery will suffer long-term effects on its lifespan. And so will a super-cold one, so don’t leave your device in the freezer or out in the snow.

Can I use any charger?

Where possible use the charger that came with your phone, as it is sure to have the correct rating. Or make sure that a third-party charger is approved by your phone’s manufacturer. Cheap alternatives from Amazon or eBay may harm your phone, and there have been several reported cases of cheap chargers actually catching on fire.

What is battery memory effect?

Battery memory effect is about batteries remembering remaining charge if you don’t let them go all the way to zero too often. So a battery frequently charged from 20- to 80 percent might ‘forget’ about the 40 percent that’s left uncharged (0-20 and 80-100).

Sounds crazy but that’s sort of true – but only for older nickel-based (NiMH and NiCd) batteries, not the lithium-ion batteries in your modern phone.

Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries don’t suffer the memory effect so you almost need to do the opposite: charge them often but not all the way throughout the day, and don’t let them drop to zero.

Storing battery tips

Don’t leave a Li-ion battery li-ing around too long at 0 percent. Try to leave it at around 40-50 percent.

These batteries drain at about 5-10 percent a month when not in use. If you let the battery discharge completely and leave it uncharged for a long period of time it may eventually become incapable of holding a charge at all (that’s properly dead).

It’s unlikely you’ll leave your smartphone lying in a drawer for very long, but some people do leave their laptop, battery packs or spare batteries unused for long periods of time. So try to keep them all at least half charged.

Li-ion battery constraints go a long way toward explaining why smartphone vendors spend millions on incremental design advantages in a market that’s moving with blinding speed. If you’re trying to figure out what your iPhone 5 — or your next Android device or Windows Phone — is going to look like, here are six things you need to know about smartphone batteries.

1. Battery in a bag

A Li-ion pouch cell is a sealed bag containing carefully layered anode and cathode sheets, separators between them, and — permeating all of these layers — a liquid electrolyte. Although tablet batteries comprise several cells (three in the new iPad), smartphones are generally powered by single cells. Either way, at one end of the battery, a printed circuit board (PCB) is connected to the positive and negative terminals of each cell and provides active protection against short circuits, overcharge, and forced discharge. Li-ion pouch cells tend to be fragile and rely on the smartphone case for protection, and so officially are not user-replaceable.

2. Squeezing in run-time

The energy density of a Li-ion pouch cell determines how much run-time you can pack into a given size (volumetric) or weight (gravimetric). Li-ion technology hit the market in 1991. Since then, processor transistor count has increased more than a thousand-fold, Li-ion energy density only threefold. Denser electronics are what make dazzling features possible, but they draw ever more power. Unfortunately, battery manufacturers are having a harder and harder time increasing energy density. This is why non-replaceable Li-ion pouch batteries are popular with smartphone and tablet designers. Without the protective case needed to make a battery safe for consumers to handle — which does nothing for energy capacity — they are thinner and pack more run-time into a smaller space.

3. The XYZ of cells

Energy density is affected by the thickness and the ratio between width (X) and length (Y) of a Li-ion pouch cell. Volumetric energy density falls off as the pouch gets thinner because the packaging takes up a higher percentage of battery volume. The optimal X-Y ratio arises because when the PCB is installed on the short edge of a narrow battery, there’s more room for the active materials (anode and cathode) that actually store energy. All other things being equal, a narrow, thicker battery will deliver better volumetric energy density than a more square one. (An interesting Apple patent reveals ways to mold batteries in more complex shapes to fit into places like the bezel that are presently impossible to use.)

4. The necessity of keeping cool

Li-ion pouch cells don’t like it hot — a common condition for smartphones, as anyone who’s ever had to wait out the “cool down” message knows. The standard Li-ion chemistry depends on an electrolyte that reacts with residual moisture to create hydrofluoric acid, the most corrosive of all chemical compounds. Like all chemical reactions, this process doubles in speed with every increase in temperature of 10 degrees Celsius. The result is reduced calendar and cycle life: not only does run-time degrade with simple age, but each charge and discharge further reduces it, until the battery just doesn’t last long enough between charges. Worse, Li-ion cells generate heat themselves during charge and discharge: the more power your smartphone calls for or the faster you charge it, the hotter the battery gets.

5. Building a smartphone

Three-layer or “carve-out”? The Motorola Droid Razr line (both Razr and Razr Maxx) is an example of the three-layer approach to smartphone design: screen, circuitry, and battery. The iPhone 4 comprises two layers — screen and electronics — with a space carved out of the PCB for the battery. In either case, a bigger screen means room for a bigger battery. Regardless of the other advantages of each approach, the narrower, thicker battery possible with the carve-out approach will offer higher energy density. In a three-layer approach, it’s also more difficult to shield the battery from components that generate heat and thus shorten battery life.

6. Chemistry: Wild card of the pack

Improvements in Li-ion chemistry may offer dramatic improvements in energy density, giving smartphone designers more choices in the feature vs. run-time battle. There’s a lot of promising research into new active materials and some new solutions already on the market. One of these uses a new Li-imide electrolyte that doesn’t generate hydrofluoric acid and thus delivers a dramatic improvement in thermal stability and battery life. It also permits effectively thinner batteries by eliminating most of the swelling in thickness characteristic of current Li-ion pouch cells over their useful life, which forces designers to sacrifice cavity space to accommodate the swelling.

Get to know your Windows 10 version numbers: where to find them and what they mean.

Depending on when it was put together, the new laptop or PC you just unboxed may or may not have Windows 10 Creators Update installed. It’s a major update that was released in April and one to which you should upgrade.

Microsoft isn’t so forward as to slap Creators Update branding all over Windows so you’ll need understand Microsoft’s numbering system for the different versions of Windows and where to find such information.

So, what’s Creators Update called?

Windows 10 Creator Update is officially Version 1703. If you are running Version 1607, then you don’t have Creators Update and are running the previous Anniversary Update of Windows 10.

The version number is based on the date of the release, using a YYMM format. So, Version 1703 for Creators Update means it’s from March of 2017 (even though it wasn’t officially released until a month later). The previous Version 1607 for the Anniversary Update then was from July of 2016.

You’ll also see a number for OS Build, which tells you the specific build you have. Microsoft releases minor updates to each major version of its OS; these smaller updates get a new OS Build number but don’t change the Version number. Creators Update has an OS Build of 15063 dot-something, while Anniversary Update has an OS Build of 14393 dot-something.

How do I check which version of Windows I’m running?

There are two ways to check:

Open Settings and go to System > About. Here, you’ll see which Edition (Home, Pro or Enterprise), Version and OS Build you are running.

The other way is to use the search bar, enter winver and hit Enter. A small window will pop up showing you the Edition, Version and OS Build that you’ve got.

How do I update to Creators Update?

Open Settings and go to Update & security and click the Check for Updates button. If it shows that no updates are available or updates you only to a newer Anniversary Update, then you can manually install Creators Update using Microsoft’s Windows 10 Upgrade Assistant.

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How to access and adjust Windows 10’s battery-saving mode.

Windows 10 has a couple of different tools for helping you eke the most life out of your laptop’s ailing battery. There’s the traditional power options menu that lets you pick and choose how long your computer should stay awake when you’re not using it, and there’s also a new battery saver feature that switches off things like push notifications — because Windows 10 is basically a mobile operating system, and it has push notifications.

The Power & sleep menu (Settings > System > Power & sleep) is nothing new. Here, you can choose how long your computer is idle before it automatically shuts off the screen or goes into Sleep mode, based on whether your computer is plugged in or running on the battery.

You can also find the Additional power settings, which opens up the Power Options menu in the Control Panel. Here, you can edit your power plans, choose what happens when you close the lid of your laptop, and choose whether to require a password when your computer wakes from sleep mode.

Battery saver

In addition to the Power & sleep settings, Windows 10 has a new feature called Battery saver. Battery saver is a battery-saving power mode specifically optimized for Windows 10, which means it does things like limit background app activity and push notifications — similar to the battery-saving modes you find on smartphones and tablets.

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Whether you have a MacBook or Windows 10 laptop, we can help you cut down its startup time.

If your laptop takes its sweet time booting up, then here are some things you can do to put a little pep back in its startup step.

Get an SSD

You can breathe new life and faster boot times into old laptops by replacing spinning hard drives (HDD) with a new solid-state drive (SSD).

Without needing to physically spin a disk to locate the data you’ve requested, SSDs are substantially faster than traditional HDDs. After installing an SSD, the first thing you’ll notice is the speed improvement it causes when you boot up your laptop.

You’ll have to open your laptop and perform a bit of surgery, but it’s a basic procedure. In a nutshell, you will need to gather a few tools, clone your hard drive to the new drive, open your laptop, remove its old hard drive and then add in a SSD in its place.

Reduce startup items

Sometimes the applications you install go ahead and include themselves among the applications that your laptop loads when it starts up. The longer that list of applications, the longer it takes to start up. Thankfully, both Windows and OS X both let you choose which applications make this list.

If you are unwilling to purchase or install an SSD, then you’ll like this move because its free and easy. And if your laptop already has an SSD, then you can further shorten its boot time.

Windows: Fast startup

For Windows 10 laptops, there’s a setting called fast startup. It cuts down on startup time by creating a state between shutdown and hibernation where your system state is saved as a hibernation file, which is then loaded when you start up your laptop again. It saves Windows the trouble of reloading the kernel, drivers, and your settings. Unlike hibernation mode though, your open folders and applications are not saved with fast startup.

OS X: Automatic login

This last tip is for Mac owners who have more than one user account set up. With automatic login, you bypass the login screen and log right into one of your accounts to speed the startup process along. Because this setting lets you log into OS X without needing to enter your password, automatic login is not advisable if you carry your laptop with you everywhere you go and are prone to leaving it unattended in public places. If your laptop spends most of the time safely at home, here’s how to enable it.

 

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We’ve all been there. You’re in a meeting, or on the road, or in a classroom, and you find, to your horror, that your laptop is nearly dead. Maybe you forgot your power adapter, maybe there isn’t an available outlet. For whatever reason, your battery power is dwindling, and you still have stuff to get done. Hope is not lost, however. There are some things you can do to buy more time on that almost-dead battery so you can meet a deadline or respond to an important email before it’s too late.

Some of these techniques are for when you need to stretch your battery at that very moment, while others are preventative measures, best implemented before your battery life comes up short. There is some of overlap between the short- and long-term strategies we’ll outline below, but even when the actions are the same, the reasons behind them may be different.

Short-Term Battery-Stretching Strategies
If you’re in a tough spot right now, there are things you can do to extend the battery life immediately. None of these actions will actually increase the amount of power left in the battery, but instead will reduce the amount of power the laptop is using, letting you squeeze in a few more precious minutes before the battery goes kaput. The name of the game in these instances is power consumption, and you need to reduce yours to as little as possible.

1. Activate Your Laptop’s Battery Saver or Eco Mode
   Designed with these sorts of circumstances in mind, most Battery Saver or Eco modes will engage a number of automatic changes to lengthen usable battery life—many of the same changes we’ll be making here. This saved profile will adjust your laptop’s settings and shift components into low-power states to help you ration your remaining juice a bit longer.
2. Disable Unused Devices and Ports
   The easiest way to reduce power consumption is to simply turn stuff off. Every component in your laptop needs power to function, but that doesn’t mean you need to power all of those components all of the time. Start by disconnecting any unneeded peripherals (like aUSB mouseor external drive) and turning off the biggest power hogs, like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios, graphics processors, and unused optical drives.
3. Adjust Your Settings
   While you’ll still have to use the display and the keyboard, you can adjust the settings for each to reduce power consumption. One often overlooked power drain is keyboard backlighting. Unless you’re in the dark and need the backlight just to make out each key, turn off the backlight entirely. You can typically assign a hotkey for this function.
4. Turn Off Apps and Processes
   It’s not just the hardware that’s stealing your battery juice. Multiple apps and processes running on your system will also chew through battery life more quickly. As with the hardware, start by turning off anything that isn’t being used.
5. Simplify
   You can also stretch your battery life by simplifying your own activities. Multitasking is nice when you have full power, but running several programs at once puts a greater load on the processor and draws more power. Adjust your computer use by sticking to one application at a time and avoiding resource-intensive programs.
6. Care and Feeding of Batteries
   It starts with taking care of the battery itself. If your system has a removable battery, take care not to damage the battery contacts. They connect the laptop to the battery, and if the contacts get dirty or damaged, it can reduce and disrupt the flow of power. You can clean the contacts with a cotton swab and rubbing alcohol, but damaged contacts might need to be professionally repaired. This doesn’t apply to laptops that seal the battery into the chassis.
7. Upgrade Components
   Another option is to ditch the hard drive entirely, and upgrade to an SSD. These use flash memory to store data instead of a spinning disk, so there are no moving parts; this automatically makes them more energy efficient. In addition to improving your laptop’s battery life, SSDs also deliver faster performance and boot times than their traditional counterparts, and remove the problems associated with fragmentation.
8. Battery Backup
   Finally, the easiest way to ensure that you always have enough battery power is to bring along an extra; either a spare battery or an external battery pack. For laptops with a removable battery, the simplest option is a second battery. These can either be ordered directly from the manufacturer, or purchased from a third-party company, usually for less than $100. Simply swap the old battery for the new once in a while when charging, and bring along the charged-up spare whenever you expect to be away from a power outlet.

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Who doesn’t have a love/hate relationship with their laptop battery? It lets us be mobile, but it also chains us to that little battery life gauge and the dreaded decay of performance as time goes on. But by following certain best practices, you can move the relationship more firmly toward the “love” side. Here’s how.

Save cycles, save your battery

All laptop batteries are built to handle a certain number of charge cycles, usually somewhere around 500 full cycles and sometimes more. Essentially, a charge cycle equals one full discharge down to zero percent and then a recharge back up to 100 percent. A discharge down to 50 percent and then back to 100 percent would equal half a cycle. Over time, each charge cycle decreases a battery’s capacity from its design specifications, meaning that the fewer times you drain it, the longer the battery last — all other things being equal.

And so, where do you start? You can begin by visiting the power settings corner of your laptop. Many computers offer the ability to switch to an “eco mode” that automatically adjusts the way power is used (such as automatically dimming your screen brightness) to conserve battery energy. You can also manually reduce the amount of power you’re using by shutting off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth when you’re not using them, turning off optional features such as keyboard backlighting, and generally reducing the number of components burning power.

Also, pay attention to hibernation modes. Ideally, you want your laptop to enter into hibernation before the battery is totally drained – as well as during downtime when you won’t be using the laptop for a while. Hibernation is typically a power state where everything in working memory has been written to the hard drive or SSD and then the laptop is turned completely off. Hibernation uses no power, as opposed to various sleep states available with modern laptops that use at least some power over time.

To save even more power, take a tour of your apps and quit any that are running in the background and steadily eating into your battery life. In Windows computers, you can look at your System Tray, your Task Manager, and your Processes tab to see which of those little icons really aren’t necessary. In macOS, you can see what apps are using the most power by clicking on the battery icon in the taskbar to the upper right and by opening the Activity Monitor and selecting the Energy section. Cloud storage services or video players that you aren’t using can be safely shut down. Both Microsoft and Apple have guides explaining the process further.

And, of course, there’s the best solution of all — don’t use your laptop on battery power, if you don’t have to. In today’s era of long battery life, it’s easy to forget to plug in when you come back to your desk. But that will, eventually, shorten your battery’s lifespan.

Keeping your battery in zone

In ancient, less enlightened times, there was a problem called “battery memory” that caused nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries to “forget” their full charge capacity and start charging at lower and lower levels. This problem doesn’t exist any longer thanks to modern lithium-ion batteries, but it has led to a lot of poor advice and arguments about battery care based on outdated information. It’s time to clear the air.

Contrary to some recommendations, you don’t need to completely discharge a lithium-ion battery and then recharge it to somehow reboot or calibrate it – this is a destructive practice that’s very hard on your battery. Whether or not it’s a smart idea to perform a complete discharge a couple of times a year remains an unanswered question. Generally, the consensus seems to be that letting your battery discharge (without bottoming it out — aim for around 20 percent) and then charge it when possible is the best practice.

Next, there was a time when users were advised to refrain from keeping their devices plugged in, based on the idea that letting a battery charge to 100 percent could wear the battery out more quickly. Today, however, modern devices are designed to stop charging at 100 percent and thus keeping them plugged in doesn’t impact the battery’s lifespan, according to Battery University.

As with many battery-related questions, the issue of keeping your laptop plugged in when it’s reached full capacity is hotly debated, and so there’s nothing wrong with turning your machine off and unplugging it. If you’re going to store your laptop for an extended time without using it, then discharge or charge it to 50 percent before putting it away.

Generally speaking, the best thing you can do for your lithium-ion battery is to avoid letting it discharge below 20 percent. Plug it in and charge it when you can, and then rinse and repeat. The good news is that with modern batteries and systems there’s really not much else you need to do — except perhaps reasonably expect that your battery will eventually start losing its overall capacity.

It’s getting hot in here, so hide your batteries

Today’s lithium-ion batteries are durable, but they can only take so much heat. High temperatures can damage your laptop battery permanently, or reduce its useful lifespan.

This leads to some common sense suggestions. For example, if you are charging your battery and it starts to get overly warm, perhaps because the CPU or graphics processor is working hard or the environment is overly hot, then shut the device down and pop the battery out if possible. Give it a break so that it can cool down or you can move to someplace with a lower temperature. Of course, many modern laptops have sealed batteries, in which case shutting the machine down and letting it cool is highly recommended if maximizing the battery’s lifespan is your concern.

Likewise, keep the laptop off of your lap. If testicular damage and discomfort weren’t good enough reasons, then with many machines you’re also making the problem worse by blocking vents. You’ll want to make sure that both vents that pull in cool air and those that expel hot air are able to do their jobs.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you should avoid placing your laptop anywhere it might become hot. That includes your car on a hot summer day, beneath a window that gets direct sunlight, or near a space heater. Unusual conditions such as these can do a lot of damage to a battery in a short period of time, though you may not realize it immediately.

Cold temperatures usually aren’t a problem down to a certain point, and storing a battery in a cool place is recommended, but don’t leave your laptop in freezing temperatures. Too much cold can also kill the battery permanently or reduce its lifespan.

If you want to watch temperature even more closely (say, you live in a particularly hot climate), then there are a number of apps you can run that will monitor laptop heat. This includes CoreTemp and Real Temp for Windows, which you can download for free.

Giving your laptop some TLC

Most people just let their laptop battery sit, snug inside the laptop, doing its job. But it’s a good idea to take your battery out from time to time and show it a little love. Every few months, detach your battery and give it a careful wipe with a soft cloth – get rid of any dust, and make sure the contact points are especially clean.

Note that this only replies to models with removable batteries. As laptops have become thinner and lighter, removable batteries have become something of a luxury. If your laptop has a sealed battery, then there’s little for you to worry about.

Things to avoid

Want the best battery? Here’s a quick list of bad practices.

• Full discharges: As mentioned, when a laptop battery discharges fully – forcing a shutdown – the battery uses up a full charge cycle. The more charge cycles consumed, the more quickly a battery will give up the ghost. Even when running a discharge cycle, don’t let the battery drop to zero percent. Instead, stop when your operating system warns you the battery is getting low.
• Reliance on hibernation modes: This is a similar point to the first. If you are constantly forcing your laptop to hibernate in order to save the battery, then you aren’t keeping your battery at the ideal percentages. Rethink your laptop habits, or at least accept that your usage patterns will result in a battery that won’t last quite so long.
• Long periods of inactivity: If you must leave your battery unused for long periods of time, then make sure it has around 50 percent charge remaining. A depleted battery can die forever if not recharged soon enough. Generally speaking, though, keep using and properly charging your battery as long as you have it.
• Hot summer days: Obviously you can’t always avoid hot summers, but you know what this means: keep your laptop cool. Store it indoors, avoid direct sunlight, and keep it out of hot cars during the warmest days.

Software and your battery

Finally, a note about your software — keep it updated! Companies work hard to improve the way that programs use power via software updates. The same operating system on a later patch could use significantly less battery power, giving your battery a longer lifespan without changing anything else. And so, review your OS and keep your machine — and its battery — on a healthy diet of updates.

 

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How long a laptop battery should last after each charge?

After the laptop has gone through a full single charge and the power adapter is unplugged, the average life of a laptop battery can be anywhere between one and six hours. This time is dependent on the battery, its capacity (mAH), what’s being done on the laptop, and how old the battery is. Over time, the laptop battery’s capacity decreases, which means the battery will not last as long as it did when you first got the laptop and will continue to decrease over time.

What’s the overall life of a laptop battery?

A laptop computer battery should last between two and four years, or around 1,000 full charges. The total lifetime of a battery is dependent on several factors. These factors include battery type (NiCad, NiMH, or Li-ion), how often the battery is used, and its age.

 

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Both total charging capacity and life of a laptop computer’s battery will diminish as you use your computer. To determine your laptop’s current battery capacity and compare it with what it was when you purchased the laptop, install either of the following applications on your computer.

Microsoft Windows users

Battery Eater – This utility performs a stress test on the battery, causing it to drain to 0. After the battery has been drained, running the utility again provides you a full report that compares the estimated capacity of the battery to its current capacity.

Tip: If you plan on using the Battery Eater test, make sure to disable all power-saving features first.

Apple Macintosh users

Coconut battery – If you are using a MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air with macOS X 10.5 or higher, Coconut is an easy-to-use utility to test your laptop’s battery.

 

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