Mitch Bartlett has written in several times before with tips and tricks. They are always excellent advice. This time, he is giving me a few pointers about extending the life of my battery in my laptop. I wanted to share these with you.

Laptop PCs need longer battery life. I used a flash-disk based laptop for much of the ’90s and loved its 10-hour laptop battery life. You just have so much more freedom when you don’t need to worry about keeping a laptop battery charged.

I’ve been very interested in how flash drives could extend notebook battery life. Using a Kill-a-watt power meter I ran some experiments with an Intel Core Duo notebook. Power use is a little more complex than I’d thought. Here’s what I found.

Laptop config:

• MacBook with the 2 GHz Core Duo,
• 2 GB RAM,
• Intel 950 integrated graphics,
• 13 inch screen,
• 8x DVD Drive,
• 160 GB Western Digital Scorpio 2.5″ 5400 RPM HDD,
• Bluetooth,
• Wi-FI

One of the nicest things about the MacBook is that disk drive removal is easy (see the 1 minute video here). I ran the tests with the internal Scorpio drive removed and ran the MacBook off an externally powered FireWire drive.

Instrumentation
In addition to the Kill-a-watt power meter, which sits between the wall power and the MacBook’s power adapter, I also used the most excellent open source MenuMeters utility. MM shows CPU, memory, disk and network usage, typically sampled over a user-selectable 1-2 second period…

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Wow! It’s Wednesday’s IT Blogwatch: in which we’re really, really excited about a notebook battery that lasts 30 years. Not to mention an awful, awful performance from Commander Riker hawking enterprise IT automation software…

A breathless Next Energy News reports:

Your next laptop could have a continuous power battery that lasts for 30 years without a single recharge thanks to work being funded by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. The breakthrough betavoltaic power cells are constructed from semiconductors and use radioisotopes as the energy source. As the radioactive material decays it emits beta particles that transform into electric power capable of fueling an electrical device like a laptop for years.
…
Betavoltaics generate power when an electron strikes a particular interface between two layers of material. The Process uses beta electron emissions that occur when a neutron decays into a proton which causes a forward bias in the semiconductor. This makes the betavoltaic cell a forward bias diode of sorts, similar in some respects to a photovoltaic (solar) cell. Electrons scatter out of their normal orbits in the semiconductor and into the circuit creating a usable electric current… [more]

Addy Dugdale digs it:

Made from radioactive material … the batteries end their life being completely inert and non-toxic, so they’re not as scary-bad as they sound … Before you all run for the tinfoil, the batteries don’t use fission or fusion, nor are there any chemical processes to produce energy, which means no radioactive or hazardous waste … Small and thin, the batteries use a porous silicon material to collect the hydrogen isotope tritium that is generated in the process. And as it’s a non-thermal reaction, your laptop will stay cooler than if its juice came from traditional lithium-ion batteries… [more]

Rupert Goodwins, the first ever blogger scoffs:

Sadly, no. As with the best techno-rubbish, there is a story in there, but you’ll be pootling around the skies in jetpacks before you’re powering your Dell from neutron decay.
…
Tritium’s half-life is around twelve years, so every decade or so your battery will halve in power … the sort of atomic structures that generate power when bombarded with high energy electrons are the sort that tend to fall apart when bombarded with high energy electrons … there’s the small problem that if you break the battery during its life the nasties come out … they don’t have a great conversion efficiency. Around 25 percent is the best you can get - which is pretty good, but leaves 75 percent sloshing around as heat. That means a 25 watt battery will get plenty warm … Even the latest devices, which are very clever in the way they saturate a porous structure with the gas and thus usefully capture quite a large number of the energetic electrons, have an energy density of the order of twenty five watts per kilo. Lithium ion batteries, the sort you have in your laptop, manage 1.8 kilowatts per kilo… [more]

Full story ComputerWorld.com

Lithium Ion notebook batteries wear down because of two factors:

1. active usage in your notebook battery
2. natural aging of the notebook battery

Both will wear down your notebook battery over time; the trick is to minimize their impact while still getting the performance out of your laptop battery that you need.

The most important thing to understand about laptop batteries is that they are always losing a small bit of their charge. The hotter the temperature, the faster notebook batteries loose their charge. So rule number one is: keep your notebook battery cool. Notebook battery manufacturers store their products at around 60F.

The second most important thing to understand about notebook batteries is that their capacity decreases with each cycle of charging and discharging. By itself, this is not surprising - but when combined with the previous point, it leads to a surprising conclusion.

When laptop users leave their laptop battery inside the machine but leave the computer plugged into the wall, the laptop battery is going through a constant charge-discharge cycle. The notebook battery is sitting unused inside the notebook, discharging a little faster than normal because of the notebook’s heat. Once its charge level drops to a predetermined level, the AC adapter provides extra juice to “top off” the notebook battery. As the laptop battery gets older, it tends to self-discharge a little faster, which accelerates the process even further…

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There are three refurbished notebook battery types, each named for its component materials:

Nickel Cadmium batteries (NiCad battery) are hardly ever seen anymore. They have dismally low capacities (2000-3000 mAH) and contain heavy metals that harm the environment. Worst of all is the dreaded “memory effect”. When you recharge a Nickel Cadmium battery before it is completely drained, the longevity of the laptop battery is compromised. That is the memory effect.

Nickel Metal Hybrid batteries (NiMH battery) have twice the capacity of Nickel Metal Hybrid batteries (4000-6000 mAH) and are half as susceptible to the memory effect. But these too are becoming rare.

Lithium Ion batteries (Li-Ion battery) are today’s laptop battery standard. They have all the capacity of a Nickel Metal Hybrid battery, but zero memory effect and zero toxins. Bonus: Li-Ion notebook batteries weigh half as much as Nickel Metal Hybrid laptop batteries. In purchasing a notebook battery, the consumer has three options: used, refurbished, or new.

Used notebook batteries that are not refurbished will probably only last you 30 minutes to an hour before needing recharging…

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Laptop users love to complain about how their notebook batteries don’t last long enough. But what if you could get more life out of your laptop battery?

Peter Robbins knows when he turns on his two year old laptop, he doesn’t have long to work.

“My laptop battery dies within a half hour,”

Robbins said.

And when he forgets to watch the power meter,

“all of a sudden it will just go into standby mode and you lose whatever you’re working on. It’s pretty frustrating,”

Robbins said.

Pc Magazine’s Cisco Cheng says no matter if a laptop user has an old, fast dying battery or just can’t plug in, there are simple ways to squeeze out more power when running on a battery. One easy tip: dim your screen.

“Dimming it by 50 percent or even to a level that you can tolerate, can have a profound effect on battery life,”

Cheng said.

Cheng says if you don’t need to be online, disable the wireless connection. Also, pick your programs wisely. Avoid using music and video players, and doing things like watching a DVD, or playing games.

“They can tax your CPU and your battery,”

Cheng said.

“If you’re running a web browser, if you’re running word processing programs, those don’t usually take a toll on your battery.”

Make your battery stronger with regular exercise. Cheng says do something called conditioning everyday…

Full Story: Keyetv.com