Improving battery life

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1 Jan 2009
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My laptop has extremely poor battery life, and I'm looking to improve it.

Would buying a new battery resolve this, or is there anything else I could do to improve it? Also, as OcUK don't sell them can you reckon any retailers?

Also, I have been told that because I leave my laptop plugged in to the mains all the time, this affects battery life. Can anyone confirm this?

I appreciate any advice :)
 
Take out the battery on the laptop when its plugged into the mains. All laptops should run without the battery.

Turn off any un-needed settings, such as bluetooth in BIOS. Other things such as wifi when not in use and maybe 3G with modern laptops.

Try running a vanilla copy of windows. If you bought your laptop from a big company (samsung, dell) they will load the OS with lots of useless stuff which really does nothing for you.

Also keep screen brightness down when you dont need it to be bright will help a bit.

I run a vanilla copy of windows xp on my samsung n130 netbook. Can easily get 7 hours from the battery with everything turned off and all services ended that dont need to be there (Printer spooling etc)
 
As above.

Also, if you do keep the battery in, ensure you power cycle it as fully as possible. Ie. use it until it's at only 1 or 2% then plug in (a friend of mine waits for it to hibernate due to low battery, then plugs it in...)

Sadly, with an old battery it probably needs replacing. Make sure to get a genuine battery, and look carefully at the number of cells/capacity. You can often buy a higher capacity replacement battery than the original!
 
Thanks for all the advice. I will need to replace my current battery first, before I start power cycling the battery correctly.

I'm struggling to find the correct battery for my laptop, I have a Phillips 15NB8611/05. Can anybody advise where I could get one from?
 
If you look at the current battery you should find a model number, which you could search for.

A search for "Philips 15NB8611 battery" yielded some results. Around the £40 mark.
 
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