The bane of the existence for may people who need to travel for work is their laptop battery. The life of a battery can very from model to model and even differ according the operating system format. For example, the battery on the latest Mac Book Pro is rated to last 7 hours when fully charged, whereas the Dell M6400 Mobile Workstation is likely to only hold a charge for about 3 hours. It is possible the enormous length of the battery is partially because the operating system has built in sleep modes and can resist draining the battery barring absolute necessities.
There are a few options for the constant traveler who must go, either meeting to meeting or coast to coast. The first option is to keep a completely charged back-up battery with you at all times. Keeping one of these handy can help to ensure there is no loss in productivity due to a lack of power. Another option is to keep a laptop charger with you when traveling. Laptop chargers can zap life back into the battery to keep it going for a certain period, depending on make and model, until you can get to a place where you can plug it into a regular wall socket. And yet another thing you can do is to purchase an external laptop battery, something that can keep you charged up while you are away from outlets and your main juice runs out on you.
Batteries for a laptop also tend to degrade with age. In other words, the older your laptop, the less likely the battery will keep it powered for very long. When laptops first came into major use, many people did not get into the habit of running the battery down without charging it prior to giving it a 100% charge. This simple technique ensures the user will be able to charge it up fully without degrading the battery life, meaning a longer life for the battery. Some manufacturers of laptops and laptop batteries do this now as part of the production process, but it never hurts to run it down yourself when you first get the machine, or the battery, just to ensure it is done and done properly.
Once your battery is in place it is important to check on its health regularly. Make sure you are using screen saver without a great deal of graphics and let your laptop “sleep” after so many minutes. Often it is simple techniques such as this that help save a battery from becoming useless after the course of a couple years or so.
