Do you know how long your battery for your Laptop or Netbook will last? You would be surprised if you test it properly.
Recently I read an article on a program about battery testing and optimization, I was intrigued. So I downloaded the program and loaded it on my five year old IBM T-30 laptop.
The program is advertised as free but in reality it is shareware. That is it has some options that will test your battery but to get to the meat of the matter of how long your battery will last and to optimize your computer devices to maximize the battery performance you have to buy it.
Ok, being an enterprising guy I set out to find out how to do the optimization before I bought the program. Don't get me wrong, I did buy the program but I wanted to know if I could do the same thing with out purchasing the program.
With a little thought I did 95% of what the program could do before I bought the program. Such as I turned off unneeded devices, lowered the screen brightness, and ran two tests against three batteries that I have for the laptop. (One thing I found is if you set the battery usage to minimum power usage through the control panel 'Power Settings' it does not turn off unneeded devices, so the battery will not last as long, you will have to turn off the devices manually).
Once I bought the program, one of the activated features, the turning off unneeded devices when 'optimizing battery usage' will extend the battery life. Be aware that when you use the program to disable devices it does so through the device manager, to use the device you have to re-enable it!
My results are almost the same as with the program, how ever the program gives me insight in to the health of each battery that I can not do with my manual testing.
Interesting results -
1. A five year old OEM (Original Equipment Manufacture) battery had a 48% heath rating.
2. A one year old battery had an 87% health rating.
3. A new (two months old battery) had a 97% health rating.
Now the interesting things are the OEM battery after five years still charges and will last almost an hour, where as the year old battery will only last two hours and some minutes. The new battery will last two and a half hours, which is about normal for this laptop. This tells me to not buy another certain brand of battery and to see if I can find any unused OEM batteries.
The main reason I was intrigued by these results is I just went to North Carolina for ten days on vacation. On the way there and back I used my laptop for five hours with the three batteries. This coincides with the tests. (My power converter fried after ten minutes of operation on the aircraft when the pilot cycled the generators - fifty bucks went poof!).
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