Making your IBM ThinkPad battery last longer

There are a number of handy tricks and techniques you can use to make your IBM ThinkPad battery last longer than it otherwise might. One idea is to keep it cool – if it gets too hot, it will use more power in cooling itself down again. You should also never keep it constantly charging when not in use. Wait until the battery is completely drained before recharging and you will keep your battery in tip-top condition.

The more you take care of your battery, the more performance you will get out of it. Although they can be a bit of a pain to charge, you’ll find the longer battery life to be very handy indeed.

Computer electricity use

Have you ever wondered how much electricity your computer uses? Not a lot of people do, but the answer is quite surprising.

Your computer’s energy use will vary depending on what you’re doing on it – editing video or listening to music uses considerably more power than just reading an email. Your computer can actually use anything from 65 to 250 watts, with the monitor using between 35 and 80 watts.

To save energy with your computer, you should always put it into standby mode when you’re not using it. In standby mode, power consumption drops to 6 watts, and the monitor uses virtually no energy at all. Interestingly, laptops only use between 15 and 45 watts in normal use.

HP laptop charger

My HP laptop charger broke the other day. It’s not been right for quite some time now – the power seemed to be getting through only intermittently, and so it would take forever for the laptop to reach full charge. I was just running it off the mains for ages as this was less hassle than waiting for it to charge, but then I thought – what’s the point of having a laptop if you can’t carry it around with you?

So I went hunting for a new charger online last night. Luckily, HP laptops are really popular, so there’s a lot of different suppliers to choose from. I got a real bargain in the end, and it should arrive any day now.