IT Tips - November 2015

IT Tips – November 2015

 

It’s time for family, turkey and perhaps a little bit of overeater’s shame.  

 

What’s Inside:

Tech Section

·         Optimize the Battery Life of your Laptop

·         Kudos

o   Thank you Jill Ann 

 

Optimize Your Laptop’s Battery Life                                   

On this glorious month of gluttony, let’s make the IT Tip short and sweet.

Many of you have laptops (or take advantage of our loaner laptops) and battery life is certainly a concern when you’re working on the go. Those of you in the field quickly notice the importance of battery life when you’re traveling. 

How can I make my battery last longer?

First, turn off your laptop. Next, watch the clock! I’ll bet the battery will last a very long time!

Kidding.

There are a few small things you can do to get big battery runtime gains. HUGE BATTERY GAINS, BRO!

Huge battery gains, bro! Get swol!!

 

Step one: run only the programs that you NEED.

Each program running on your laptop is going to make the laptop’s brain work harder. Like a human, the harder the laptop’s brain works, the more calories (electricity) it will consume. You don’t like thinking hard when you’re hangry right? Well don’t make your laptop do that either.

Instead of leaving 20 Internet tabs and 15 Excel sheets open, only open the programs that are necessary to complete the task at hand. This will make a noticeable runtime improvement when you’re working on the battery.

Step two: reduce the screen brightness!

The only thing more power hungry than the laptop’s brain is the screen backlight. Interestingly, your screen doesn’t actually emit its own light. Instead, there is an array of LED bulbs behind the screen that cast light through the display so that you can see what’s on the screen. These lights use electricity like a marathon runner burns calories.

My suggestion here is to reduce the brightness to the lowest acceptable level when you’re running on battery power. By “acceptable” I mean lower the brightness as much as you can without having to strain to read the screen.

How to adjust the screen brightness on a Lenovo Yoga:

1.     Press the F5 key (with the sun icon and –) to decrease the brightness and F6 (with the sun icon and +) to increase the brightness.

  

2.     If your Fn key has a little green light illuminated then Fn lock is enabled. Press and hold the Fn and Esc keys to disable Fn lock and then try step 1 again.

 

How to adjust the screen brightness on a Dell laptop:

1.     Press and hold the Fn (function) key.

2.     Whlle still holding the Fn key, press the Down arrow key to decrease the brightness (There should be a sun icon with a down arrow). Conversely, the up arrow (with the sun icon and up arrow) will increase the brightness.

  

 

Step Three: Disable the laptop’s radios.

The radio transceivers in your laptop (WiFi, Bluetooth etc…) consume battery even when they’re not in use. This occurs because the radios are constantly scanning for networks/devices even if there isn’t anything in range.

If you don’t need Internet connectivity (or you’re somewhere that doesn’t have any WiFi – like a plane), then disable your laptop’s radios to save power.

How to disable the radios on a Lenovo Yoga:

1.       Click the WiFi icon.

    

2.       Switch “Airplane mode” to “On”.

    

3.       Remember to turn airplane mode back off when you need to use WiFi!

     

How to disable your Dell laptop’s radios:

1.     Flip the WiFi switch on your laptop to the off position. The switch will show red on the switch itself when the WiFi is off. The switch is located on the right-side of the laptop (if you’re facing the screen) just above the CD drive.

a.      E6400 switch:

Notice the red in the switch. That means it's off.

 

b.      E6430s Switch:

Notice the red in the switch. That means it's off.

 

 

Step Four: Use Sleep!

If you think it will be a while before you can feed your laptop some of that sweet, sweet electricity juice, put it to sleep rather than shutting down. Booting up after a shutdown will use a lot more power than resuming from sleep. So if you’re done with the laptop and you might need it again before you can be near a power source, sleep it instead of shutting down!

You can sleep it by closing the lid or choosing “sleep” from the normal shutdown menu.

Note: This doesn’t mean you should never reboot. If you have trouble or odd behavior with your laptop, a reboot is always the first thing to try. 

 

Kudos

I want to extend a thank you to Jill Ann Smith for inspiring the battery life tip!

 

 

Have a great month, everyone!

-Keith

Please don’t hesitate to shoot me an email if you have a something that you think will make a good tip. You’ll get credit on the blog for your contribution and I might give you a high-five