With so many people working from home amid the global pandemic, it’s important to know how to care for the equipment that you’re using to connect both to work and to your friends and family. For most people, this equipment will include a laptop of some kind.
One of the biggest issues when working from a laptop is running out of battery. Without this power, your laptop is useless. And if you don’t know how to protect your power, you could find that your battery life gets shorter and shorter in very little time. So to help you avoid this, here are three tips for caring for the battery in your laptop.
Take Care When Leaving Apps Running
Your laptop can have a lot of different applications and windows open at one time. However, when you choose to use your laptop in this way, you will find that your battery life will drain down very quickly.
To combat this, Tyler Lacoma, a contributor to Digital Trends, advises that you take care when leaving apps running in your laptop. Ideally, you should close down any apps that you’re not going to be using anymore once you’re ready to navigate away from them. If you forget to do this, your laptop can start functioning slower and using up more of your battery to try to keep these apps running in the background. But by closing them down, you won’t have these issues.
Keep Your Laptop Cool
When you’re using your laptop, all of the components working together creates heat. And while your laptop has ways to try to keep things as cool as it can, if your hardware gets too hot, it can be harmful to your battery life.
Knowing this, Andy Betts, a contributor to MakeUseOf.com, recommends that you do your best to make sure there’s good air flow around your laptop, especially where the fans are putting out warm air. This can be done by keeping your laptop on a hard surface rather than on something soft that could block those vents. You’ll also want to keep your laptop out of the sun or other warm environments.
Enable Sleep Or HIbernate Modes
As you work on your laptop, it’s easy to just set it to the side as you focus your attention on something else. But when this happens, you’re wasting the battery life that you have left.
To ensure that this doesn’t happen for too long, Cameron Sherber, a contributor to Chron Small Business, recommends that you enable sleep or hibernation mode on your laptop. This will cause your laptop to go black and start saving energy when your device has been inactive for a certain amount of time. This simple feature can help save your battery from dying too quickly.
If you need to take better care of your laptop’s battery, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you accomplish this.