Lifehacker recently found a nice article written on the Friedbeef’s Tech blog which gives 15 tips on how to get the best longevity out of your laptop’s battery. Here are a few of the tips which I find the most helpful:

  • Defrag regularly – if your disk is defragmented the disk will be more energy efficient
  • Dim your screen – the size of your computer’s screen, and how dim or well-lit it is has a big influence on your battery life. If you’re looking for a laptop that will give you a great battery life, don’t look for those laptops with big screens.
  • Cut down on programs running in the background – the more programs you have running, specially those that access or record data on to your disk, the less battery life you will have
  • Cut down external devices – USB devices, specially those with batteries that are charged via USB (like iPods and other DAPs), and Wifi or similar wireless network devices/protocols all consume a lot of energy.
  • Run off a hard drive rather than CD/DVD – running things off of CD/DVDs consumes a lot of energy, much more than the energy that a Hard Drive requires.
  • Go easy on the PC demands – “Passive activities like email and word processing consume much less power than gaming or playing a DVD. If you’ve got a single battery charge – pick your priorities wisely.”

You can find the full list in the original article, but these tips above should be enough to get you “started”.

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