A complaint that I get from clients is, “My laptop is only two years old and the battery is dying after less than an hour.”

Something to note: Pay attention not to how long the battery life is stated, but the time it will last when unplugged, meaning that if your computer is rated as having a three-hour battery life, the time starts when you unplug it. When you turn on your laptop, it is still under those three hours. Thus, if extended battery life is a concern, when buying a PC I would spend the money on a system with a longer battery life.

Use your laptop like a cell phone. Charge the laptop till it’s at 100% then UN­PLUG it! Use the laptop till the warning light says it is at its lowest point and then recharge to 100%. Unfortunately, most us­ers leave the laptop plugged in constantly. This isn’t how batteries were designed. It actually will harm the battery. If your bat­tery dies, do not run to EBay and buy an aftermarket battery. These batteries have been known to cause damage to the lap­top. In some rare cases aftermarket batter­ies can cause harm to users as well. The best thing to do is to get the original bat­tery from the manufacturer of your PC. This can be purchased on Amazon or on the manufacturer’s site.

You’re in a meeting, or on a vacation, and your laptop is nearly dead. Of course you grabbed your son’s charger and, as luck would have it, the airport has no spare outlets. 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. Below are five tips to extend your bat­tery life.

The top four for saving power are the graphics card, the opti­cal drive, Ethernet, and Wi- Fi adapters. Find the device you want to shut down. Right click on the device name, and select “Disable” from the drop down menu. Just like an ex­tension cord left plugged into an outlet, these unused plugs still have power go­ing through them. The actu­al impact on battery life will be minimal, but if you need to extend another minute or two of life, this will help.

1. Activate Your Laptop’s Battery Saver Mode

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. This is done by turning off unnecessary devices, adjust­ing settings to reduce power consump­tion, shutting down unwanted apps and processes, and adjusting your activities to use less power.

2. Disable Unused Devices and Ports

The best way to reduce power is turn­ing stuff off. Every part in your laptop needs power to function. Disconnect any unneeded devices, a USB mouse or exter­nal drive. Turn off the biggest power suck­ers, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios. To disa­ble unused devices on a Windows system, open up your system’s Control Panel and find the Device Manager.

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.

The next power drain is your screen. While you need to keep them up and running to use the laptop, you don’t necessarily need it run­ning at 100% brightness or full resolution. Many laptops will have hotkeys for increasing and decreasing the screen brightness.

Here is one people don’t think of: turn off or turn down the sound. If you need to hear, drop the sound down as low as you can or use a headset. Whenever possible, just mute the laptop altogether. That way the speakers won’t be getting any power, and you’ll buy yourself some more pre­cious time.

4. Turn off Apps and Processes

It’s not just the hardware that’s stealing your battery power, Apps and processes run­ning on your system will also will exhaust your battery life. Start by turning off anything that isn’t being used. In Windows, start by taking a look in your System Tray, next to the clock. On the left end of the System Tray, select the icon to display hidden icons. Take note of which apps are running in the background. Open up the Task Manager by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc, or use Ctrl+Alt+Del and select Task Manag­er from the menu. Once in the Task Manag­er, look at the open apps; you may find that a program or two have been left running simply because you forgot to close a window instead of minimizing it. Next, go to the Processes tab. This shows you what processes are currently running on your machine. Cloud storage ser­vices like Dropbox or Google Drive can be dis­abled without causing any problems.

For MacBooks, the process is a little different. Power Nap is an Ap­ple OS X feature that checks your email and twitter feeds for activi­ty while the system is asleep. If you are trying to maximize battery life, it would be wise to turn that fea­ture off.

5. Simplify

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. Start by single-tasking—if you need to type up a Word document, close any additional programs. You’ll get longer battery life by not running any stream sites like Pan­dora. You might also want to use Notepad for a simple text file instead of Word. Some activi­ties you’ll want to avoid all together are photo and video editing tools. These are the biggest power suckers. By eliminating unnecessary power suckers, you should be able to extend the life of your battery in those emergency sit­uations.

Today there are many cheap temp bat­tery solutions that might buy you an hour. These devices should be run by standard AAA or AA batteries. Keep a pack of these batteries in your bag for a long trip

FYI. On a great website called Woot. com I was able to purchase a briefcase that has an internal battery with a USB charger that can charge cell phones or lap­tops.

By Shneur Garb