5 Tips to Extend Your Laptop Battery's Life

Save Battry

There's been a lot of talk recently about laptop battery life -- we told you, for example, about how some folks thought Windows 7 was misreporting laptop battery levels, but in reality it appears that the OS is simply accurately indicating battery wear, so you can be better informed about when to replace the battery.

Your laptop battery, you see, starts losing capacity as soon as you drive it off the lot, and after a year or two you might need to get a new battery just to get an hour or two away from an outlet.

So what steps can you take to make the battery last as long as possible? Mind you, I'm not talking about optimizing the runtime on a single charge. I am talking about getting as much mileage as possible from a battery before you have to replace it just to get a reasonable runtime out of each charge. Here are a few ways you can get the most out of your laptop battery:


1. Keep your laptop battery cool. Batteries degrade more quickly when they're hot. That means you should keep vents clear -- don't put your laptop on a fluffy pillow or a cushioned surface that will cover vents and trap heat.

2. Don't pack your laptop away in a backpack or other enclosed space when the battery is still warm, trapping the heat. A battery that's frequently hot to the touch will lose life a lot faster than a battery that isn't constantly being stressed. Worst of all: If your laptop crashes or refuses to shut off properly, the battery can get extremely hot when packed away in your bag. Check it to make sure it hasn't gotten dangerously hot while stowed away over the weekend.

3. Don't charge your laptop constantly. If you only occasionally take your laptop away from a power outlet, but leave it plugged in to charge 24/7, you're leaving your laptop in a state of perpetual charge at the 100% point -- and that is bad for the battery's long-time health.

4. If you tend to use your laptop mainly at your desk, exercise your laptop battery by running it down and recharging it once or (even better) twice a month.

5. Alternately, you might want to physically remove the laptop battery if you're using the laptop at your desk for long stretches of time. If you do remove it, don't store it in a fully charged or depleted state. It's best to store it in the middle -- between 40 and 50 percent of full charge. 

 

 

Source: cbsnews.com

Mozilla takes another stab at elusive multiprocess Firefox

Firefox may offer a lot of competitive features in a tight browser marketplace, but one thing it lacks is the kind of sandboxed, multiprocess architecture under its hood that other browsers have had for years.

 

Changing to a multiprocess architecture for Firefox would result in numerous benefits, wrote Firefox engineer Bill McCloskey on Thursday, in the three key areas of performance, security, and stability. A multiprocess architecture splits various browser functions into multiple tasks on the computer, instead of bundling them all together as one process for the browser.

 

While Firefox's performance now is significantly faster than it was a few years ago, thanks in large part to projects like MemShrink and Snappy, a multiprocess backend would allow Firefox developers to more easily debug problems, which in turn would allow developers to make their JavaScript run faster.

 

Another benefit on the performance front is that much of the work that went into Electrolysis, Mozilla's previous multiprocess attempt, found its way into Firefox OS. It would help, McCloskey wrote, for Firefox OS and Firefox to have backends that function as similarly as possible.

 

Multiprocess architecture would be safer for Firefox users as well, he said, because it would allow the browser's content processes to be sandboxed. While sandboxing is possible in single-process systems, it doesn't make sense in a browser where add-on and other processes have to regularly access the file system.

 

"Right now, if someone discovers an exploitable bug in Firefox, they're able to take over users' computers," McCloskey said.

 

The browser would become more stable as a result of the multiprocess implementation because a process crash would only take down that specific process, not the entire browser.

 

McCloskey also said that the multiprocess architecture is a long way from reaching the stable version of Firefox. Concerns about keeping the browser's memory footprint small will keep Mozilla from switching to the new architecture until its ready. "The total memory usage for multiprocess Firefox is only 10 MB greater than single-process Firefox," McCloskey said. "We should be able to shrink this difference with some effort." Also keeping Firefox from achieving multiprocess architecture are concerns about add-on and plug-in compatibility. "It's a large project and any predictions at this point would be foolhardy," he said.

                                  Source:- Cnet tech news