Monday, September 14, 2009

Ways For Extending Your Laptop's Life

By Francua Smith

If you want to extend your laptop's life, there are some particular things you can do. You absolutely want to make your laptop final as long as possible, and not ought to buy a fresh machine every year or two. No matter what fee your laptop cost you, you'd do well to study the following tips to extend its life. Read on to discover some excellent tips on this topic ...

1. Keep It Cool The first thing I always do to extend my laptop's life? Well, it's simple. Keep it cool. The more heat your laptop accumulates, the more likely it is to suffer from component failure. Note that if you like to slump into a couch to type on your laptop, you will most likely block the machine's air vents and prevent air from circulating. This spells heat for the machine - which is not a good thing. To cool a laptop, one good way is to get a cooling pad. These things draw heat away from the system and usually cost about say $30. You will, at the same time prevent your laptop's internal fans from spinning too much, saving your battery life as well.

2. Carry The Laptop Carefully I've seen some folks treat and carry their laptops like junk. If you throw your laptop onto the bed and it lands on the floor, or you leave it in the hot sun in the back seat of you automobile - well, fine luck. No laptop is gonna survive long in those circumstances. You need to make confident you carry the laptop with care. In addition, get a fine bag that offers maximum protection. Targus makes excellent laptop bags and they have padded sidewalls with air-protection technology.

3. Choose a SSD A solid-state drive (SSD) is a next generation kind of hard drive. There are no moving parts, no platters or read/write heads (hard drive jargon). Everything is stored in non-volatile flash memory, like in your pen drive. This does wonders for your laptop. You will have longer lifespan because you don't have a moving hard drive that breaks down. You also generate less heat since there's no hard drive whirring in the background. Now, the prices of SSDs are still quite high and cost about $15 per GB - these are however coming down. I think the maximum size now is about 128 GB. Remember to look out for them if you're trying to get a new laptop.

4. Protect The Battery Your laptop's battery is also very sensitive. Don't charge and discharge it all the time. Whenever you plug your laptop into an outlet, make it a habit to unplug the battery. If you leave it in, the AC power could cause the battery to overheat and overcharge. Then, when running on battery power, use the laptop until you get a low-battery warning, then plug in the charger and let it recharge fully. That'll extend the life of that battery.

5. Reformat the Hard Drive If you find your laptop running really slow, one option is to reformat the hard drive. Remember, we all let all sorts of junk software clog up our operating systems. Windows tends to get bogged down by the orphaned files, funny Registry entries and spyware. Reformat the hard drive and install everything clean (get a friend or a shop to do it if you're not sure how). I guarantee you will get your laptop functioning and running faster. One trick I like to use is to install all my essential software (Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat, etc.) then take a backup using imaging software (e.g. Acronis True Image). When you feel the laptop going sluggish, simply backup your data files and do a image restore. Your system will be refreshed with all the original clean, intact programs and it will run faster.

6. Avoid The Standby Mode One last thing is regarding the Standby mode. Standby mode is nice but it consumes battery power. So you risk reducing the life of your battery. Next time, use the Hibernate mode instead of Standby, it preserves your laptop's current state by writing it to the hard drive as a file. And it does not require no power. It takes a few extra seconds to use Hibernate, but it will extend your laptop battery life.

Conclusion I hope this article has shown you some good tips for extending your laptop's life. Note that a laptop is a pricey investment - do your best to keep it safe and working for a long, long time. By the way, if you're interested in laptops or want to learn more about them, feel free to check out my free guide.

About the Author:

No comments: