laptop battery news

Computers are becoming more compact from the dinosaur models that first hit the market over 20 years ago. This trend has been applied to laptop computers as they too have been scaled down in size while still providing maximum output potential. When looking at purchasing a laptop, a person must weigh all sides of owning one, both good and bad.

Each benefit to owning a laptop has its positives and negatives. Laptop computers are very mobile and can accompany their owner anywhere they go. This is great for people who are constantly on the move but does highlight one drawback to owning one because this means a laptop is more easily stolen than desktop computers. When bringing a laptop into a public setting, make sure it is always secure.

However, laptops, being mobile computer machines, have other positive benefits. People can use them while lying in bed or in a favorite comfortable spot while at home which is better than sitting at a computer desk. However, the shortcoming of kind of mobility is that a laptop can fall and break much easier than other types of stationary desktops.

Battery life also has its positive stigmas attached to laptop usage. Charging a laptop battery to its fullest potential can allow a person to be on a computer away from power sources. However, laptop batteries are notorious for having short life spans. After using a laptop for a year, the battery will not hold its charge as well causing battery life to diminish quickly.

All in all, laptops are remarkable machines that really make life easier for their owners by having all the same characteristics of a desktop computer. Whether for personal or business use, their mobility can facilitate a person who is always on the move. However, because of this they are much easier to steal, can become damaged much easier, and batteries will need replacing down the road.

While preparing your laptop for airport security checks, use the ‘suspend mode’ (Windows) as an alternative to making sure your battery has enough power to boot up.

Activate the suspend mode the last time you use your laptop before going to the airport. It will restart quickly and consume almost no battery power, leaving the maximum battery charge if you want to work during the flight. (For Mac users, it is the ‘sleep’ mode)

When you go through airport security, you may be asked to turn your laptop on. So make sure your battery has enough power left to avoid delays. The process may also be sped up by booting from a floppy diskette.

The world has come a long way in the world of embedded computing, with more and more power now able to squeeze onto integrated circuits versus having to use discrete processors and the like. Integrated graphics are far more powerful now than they were, and integrated processors in general are far more capable now than ever before. But there is still a long ways to go in making fewer things discrete, namely the battery. The battery has held back innovation in consumer electronics for as long as portable devices have been around; regardless of how great a design is, there must always be consideration made for a battery. Drats.

Oki Printed Circuits is hoping to change our opinion on these batteries by making them easier to integrate into future devices, possibly eliminating the need for external batteries altogether. The company recently showcased a prototype board with an all-solid-state Lithium-Ion battery (rechargeable) at the JPCA Show in Japan, which actually has a battery embedded into a printed circuit board. We were pretty impressed when we heard that Asus managed to embed an integrated ATI Radeon 5000 series GPU into a standard ATX desktop motherboard, but this feat may be even more amazing.

The battery on the PCB is a product of Infinite Power Solutions, with an output voltage of 4.2V and capacity of 0.7mAh. Obviously this is fairly weak at the moment, but things could always be scaled up in time. The prototype is simply using the integrated battery to turn on and off a LED lamp, but in the future it could be used to remotely power far more powerful objects or even keep your entire motherboard running in case of power failure in your home.

The company hopes to bring the product to market in 2011, with the help of “several corporate partners.”

Laptop and mobile phone batteries could see a tenfold boost in performance if a technology breakthrough from scientists in the US comes to fruition.

According to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, replacing conventional battery electrodes with those coated with carbon nanotubes can drastically increase the power to weight ratio compared to conventional lithium-ion batteries.

The scientists say they produced the powerful new electrodes by alternatively dipping a base material in solutions containing carbon nanotubes with positive and negative charges to make a stable film coating.

The result is an electrode that is more porous and contains more oxygen groups, which can store a larger number of lithium ions.

According to the scientists, the energy output for a given weight of this new electrode material was five times greater than for conventional capacitors, and the total power delivery rate was 10 times that of lithium-ion batteries.

In addition to their high power output, the researchers claim the carbon nanotube electrodes were highly stable showing no change in performance over 1,000 charge cycles.

Although carbon nanotube production is currently limited to niche suppliers, several companies are gearing up for mass production of the material.

So you forgot your power cord on your way to an important meeting or the coffee shop. We’ve all been there. There’s nothing you can do to stop your battery drain, but you can do a lot to slow its inevitable demise.

If you’ve got a laptop with a really old battery that drains in a few minutes after a full charge, there’s not much you can do to make that old thing last much longer—you’ll probably want to replace the battery before you do anything else. For everybody else, these tips can help you keep your battery working at peak efficiency.

What Drains Your Battery?

In order to help maximize your battery life, it’s important to first understand what drains the power from your laptop battery, and in a modern laptop it’s pretty simple—the LCD panel is the biggest culprit by far. Microsoft’s Windows 7 Engineering blog has put together a very useful chart that helps show you exactly what percentage each component will drain, which helps us know where to start when trying to maximize the battery life.

The one thing this chart doesn’t point out are add-on devices like flash drives, USB mice, and especially PC Cards—which are known to kill your battery very quickly. If you’ve got an unpowered hard drive plugged into your laptop through a USB port, it’s going to drain your battery more quickly than if you had a powered one.

Tweak Your Power Plan Settings

The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure that you have a reasonable power plan selected for when you’re rolling on battery power. The high performance plan is always tempting (you’re a high performance user, after all), but you’ll burn through your battery a lot more quickly, so select the Power saver or Balanced plans, and make sure it’s set to turn off the display quickly after inactivity, since that’s the biggest power drain.

Next, you’ll want to dig further into the Advanced Power Plan settings, and make sure that the On battery settings are set to maximize battery life—change the plan to turn off the hard disk quickly, use the low-power mode for your wireless adapter, processor, and especially your graphics card. The System cooling policy setting allows you to specify whether the laptop will rely on fans for cooling, or slow the processor down when the temperature gets out of hand, and can definitely help your battery life, though at the cost of some performance.

Adjust the Screen Brightness

Since we’ve already shown that the LCD screen is the biggest drag on your battery life, the quickest way to save your battery life is to use your laptop’s hardware buttons to control the screen brightness—most laptops require holding down the function key and using the brightness keys, and turning it down as far as you can (while still visible) is a good idea. It may seem like an obvious choice, but it’s worth emphasizing at the top of the list for one reason: Of everything you can tweak to improve your battery life, this one change alone is at the top of the list of tweaks that can dramatically improve your battery life.

Make sure that your power plan is set to turn off the display quickly when your laptop is idle, and don’t use any fancy screensavers that overuse the graphics capabilities of your laptop. Many web sites tell you to disable Aero to squeeze more battery life, and it’s true that you might get a very small bit of extra life, a couple of minutes at the very most—you will be much better off adjusting the screen brightness and using aggressive screen blanking settings.

Optimize Your Hardware for Power Consumption

Does your laptop have a Bluetooth adapter that you aren’t using? What about IR? Each of these devices consumes power just by being enabled, and if you aren’t using them, you may as well disable them to save a little bit of battery. If you’re using your laptop on the plane, train, or somewhere without a wireless hotspot, use the hardware button to disable the Wi-Fi adapter if you have one, or just disable it manually in Control Panel.

Try to avoid using a PC Card adapter, as they can drain your battery quickly, and make sure that your USB devices are set to allow Windows to shut them off to save power—you can find the settings in device manager’s Power Management property pane for the device.

You’ll also want to make sure that your laptop has enough RAM—if Windows has to constantly thrash the disk because you don’t have enough RAM to keep everything in memory, you either should consider upgrading your RAM or running fewer applications at once.

Kill Background Processes and Services

Runaway system processes can do more than just kill your PC’s performance—they can also kill your battery as well. You’ll want to make sure that you close any background applications you don’t need to be running while you are on battery power, and disable any automated updaters, scheduled tasks, and especially search indexing.

Prime targets for removal are things like Windows desktop gadgets, and all of those applications that hide themselves in your system tray. It’s time for a cleanup, so disable or uninstall any application running in your system tray that you don’t actually need. (Only uninstall if you’re still plugged in—no use wasting extra battery life on that now.) It’s not just good for your battery life, it’s a good practice in general.

If you want an easier way to toggle settings on or off, you can use previously mentioned utility Aerofoil to help you automatically disable Aero Glass, switch between power plans, mute the sound, and even disable the sidebar, all with a tiny, lightweight icon sitting in the system tray.

Use Hibernate Mode When Possible

Using Hibernate mode instead of Sleep allows your laptop to completely power down and use zero power, so if you aren’t going to be using your laptop for another hour or more, put it into Hibernate mode instead of sleep mode, which still uses a trickle of battery life to keep everything in memory.

One of the other benefits of using Hibernate mode that many people don’t consider is that there are any number of ways that your laptop can be accidentally woken out of sleep mode—for instance, a scheduled task for an application that pulls your laptop out of sleep mode to do backups, or just an unruly device that triggers the laptop to wake up. If you are using Hibernate mode, nothing can wake the laptop other than the power button.

Take Care of Your Battery by Avoiding Heat

Laptop batteries are always going to slowly lose their ability to charge over time, but when a laptop is constantly overheating or used in a very hot environment, your battery is going to die very quickly. 

Today’s laptops use Lithium batteries instead of nickel, but there’s a lot of incorrect information out there about how to charge or drain your batteries, so let’s set the record straight: Nickel batteries required being fully drained before a recharge to optimize your battery life, but Lithium batteries are the opposite—you do not need to fully discharge it before recharging, and in fact, if you fully deplete a lithium battery and don’t recharge for a while, it can become incapable of holding a charge.

You’ll also want to make sure that your battery is not always fully charged—Wikipedia points out that if your lithium battery is fully charged all the time, you will lose up to 20% of your capacity every year, no matter what you do. Make sure to discharge the battery sometimes, and if you spend most of your time plugged in at a desk, you would be better off running the battery down to half, and then simply removing the battery and storing it in a cool place. You can use Hibernate mode to save exactly what you were doing while still shutting down the laptop completely.

As global auto manufacturers struggle to develop an electric vehicle (EV) battery to run beyond 200km on a single charge, a group of electric vehicle enthusiasts in have Japan managed to run an electric vehicle more than 1,000kms on a single charge, thus breaking their own previous Guiness record.

Photo Credit: Japan Electric Vehicle Club

What is more remarkable is that these enthusiasts from the Japan Electric Vehicle Club (Japan EV Club) used 8,320 cylindrical lithium-ion laptop batteries to run the Mira EV for 1,003.84km for almost 28 hours at an average speed of around 40km/h on a single charge.

In comparison, Japan’s third-biggest carmaker’s Nissan’s upcoming electric vehicle the ‘Leaf’, priced just under €30,000, runs only for 100km on a single charge. 

This bunch of EV enthusiaists have been able to crack the barriers of EV battery – something the collective skills of highly paid engineers at Toyota, General Motors, Daimler, Nissan or even the Chinese electric car maker BYD, in which Warren Buffett has invested immense faith and money, could not.

The Japan EV Club had taken a Daihatsu Mira model car and replaced its petrol engine with an electric motor and powered the car with 8,320 cylindrical Sanyo lithium-ion batteries used in computer laptops.

They took the Mira EV to a race track of a training school for auto racers in Shimotsuma, Ibaraki on 22 May and seventeen drivers took turns in driving it for 27.5 hours at an average speed of 25 mph (40 kph).

They drive lasted 1,003.84 kms (623.76 miles) without recharging, breaking their own previous record of 555.6kms (345 miles) set last November.
By using the same number of batteries this time, the Japan EV Club was able to double the distance the Mira EV ran on a single charge after some modifications in just a few months.

Although the Japan EV Club were not able to get the EV speed higher than 25 mph, which is not practical in driving in traffic roads or the impractical and costly computer laptop lithium-ion batteries, their achievement has to be applauded since they proved that an EV can go the distance on a single charge.

SAN FRANCISCO — Hewlett-Packard Co. is recalling 54,000 lithium-ion batteries used in HP and Compaq computers after receiving reports of injuries from the batteries overheating and rupturing.

The recall was announced Friday by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and expands an earlier recall of 70,000 of the same type of batteries.

The earlier recall came after two reports of the batteries overheating. The commission said that since then, HP has received 38 additional reports of the batteries overheating, causing 11 minor injuries. Those people were burned when they handled computers whose batteries had ruptured, said CPSC spokesman Scott Wolfson.

Batteries can rupture if they’ve been charged too long and don’t have a good way to regulate the excess heat. Wolfson added that the industry is working to change that.

HP says the computers at issue were sold in stores and online from August 2007 through July 2008. The battery packs were also sold separately.

Friday’s recall pales in comparison to the recall in 2006 and 2007 of nearly 10 million of a model of Sony batteries that were used by almost every major PC manufacturer.

___

Online:

http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml10/10240.html