Increase Your Windows 7 Laptop’s Battery Life

Watching the life drain from your laptop when you’re on the move is stressful. Sure, there are extended and slice batteries for a variety of machines, and portable laptop battery packs are available from many companies. But those options can mean carrying more bulk in a bag already bogged down with cords, files and accessories. One surefire way to preserve the battery you do have is to follow these tips. Ways to Increase Your Windows 7 Laptop’s Battery Life.

1. Lower your screen brightness.

Your screen backlight uses the most power of any component in your notebook, so you can save a lot of juice by turning it down to the lowest acceptable level. You can manually raise and lower the brightness in increments of 10 percent by hitting the appropriate key combination for your laptop (example: Fn + left/right arrows on the Acer Aspire TimelineX series), but we recommend changing the brightness in your power profile so it lowers automatically every time you unplug.

To lower the brightness level in your power profile:

• Select Power Options from the control panel.


• Click Change Plan Settings next to your current power plan.


• Select “Change advanced power settings.”


• Expand Display, then Display brightness.


• Enter a brightness percentage for On Battery, then Click OK.


• Experiment with different brightness levels to determine which is the lowest you can tolerate.

2. Prevent scheduled tasks from running on battery power.

Your virus scanner and disk defragmenter, along with auto updates from the likes of Apple and Google, are scheduled to run themselves on a regular basis—often without your knowledge or consent. Set these tasks to run only on AC power so they don’t eat up precious juice running your hard drive, CPU and wireless while you’re unplugged.

• Select Administrative Tools > Task Scheduler in the Control Panel.


• Select Task Scheduler (Local) in the left window pane.


• Go through each active task that has a future date in the Next Run Time column and do the following:

1. Double-click the task.


2. Select the Conditions tab.


3. Toggle on the first two power options: “Start the task only if the computer is on AC power” and “Stop if the computer switches to battery power” if they are not already checked.


4. Click the back button to return to the list of active tasks.

3. Turn off backlit keyboards.

If your notebook has a backlit keyboard, it will certainly help you see keys in a dark room, but it’s also sucking juice out of your battery. You’ll save some power by turning off that light. Every notebook has its own way of enabling or disabling its keyboard backlight, but the method usually involves hitting a Function key on the top row of the keyboard.

4. Unplug all USB devices and remove all discs.

Every USB peripheral attached to your notebook is eating up power just by registering itself with the operating system. By the same token, CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays can drain battery life, even when they’re just sitting idle in your optical drive. Remove any discs along with USB keys, card readers, modems or other peripherals you don’t need while on battery power.

5. Turn on High-Contrast mode.

The LED-backlit screens used on most modern notebooks expend less energy displaying black pixels than those showing colors. Setting your computer to show white and yellow text on a black background can improve battery life and even make text more readable when sunlight is hitting your screen.

To enable High-Contrast mode in Windows 7, simply hit the key combination Left Shift + Left Alt + Print Screen and click Yes when asked to confirm. You can turn off High-Contrast mode by hitting the same combo.

High-Contrast mode will affect your desktop and most Windows programs, including the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox. However, if you use the Chrome browser, you will need to install the Change Colors extension, which is available for free from the Chrome Web Store. Once the extension is installed, it will show an icon in the right side of your address bar. Click that icon and select “Apply override on all pages” to enable high-contrast mode.

6. Hibernate instead of sleep.

When you close the lid on your notebook and put it to sleep, the computer is still sending some power to the RAM and motherboard in order to keep the current session in memory so your system can wake quickly. Some newer lightweight notebooks such as the ASUS ZenBook UX31 have been designed to use little power during sleep, but most notebooks suck down quite a bit of juice unless they’re completely powered off.

In Hibernate mode, your notebook will save its memory to disk and completely power off, rather than just going to sleep. It will take nearly as long to wake from hibernation as it does to boot, but once it wakes, your session will be right where you left it.

To make your computer hibernate on demand, simply click the arrow next to the Shutdown button and select Hibernate. If you do not see Hibernate available as an option, your computer does not support this mode.

If your computer supports hibernation, you may want to set it to hibernate every time you close the lid.

To set your notebook to hibernate upon lid close:

• Type Lid into the Start menu text field.


• Click “Change what closing the lid does.”


• Select Hibernate from the “When I close the lid” menu under On Battery.


• Click Save Changes.

7. Disable Bluetooth.

If your notebook has Bluetooth, you’re probably not using it much. However, the radio is still sucking power, even when nothing is connected to it.

To disable Bluetooth:

• Type Network Connections into the text field in the Start Menu.


• Select View Network Connections.


• Right-click on the Bluetooth Network Connection > Disable.

8. Turn off Wi-Fi when not in use.

If you’re connected to the Internet via Ethernet, or if you’re working some place that has no wireless signal, you can save a lot of power by turning off your notebook’s Wi-Fi radio. Most notebooks have a Function key on the top of the keyboard that toggles Wi-Fi on or off, though some have a dedicated button or switch.

9. Minimize hard drive usage.

If your notebook has a 5,400- or 7,200-rpm hard drive, it’s sucking up a lot of juice just spinning that magnetic platter around. There are several ways to save power by minimizing disk activity.

• Defragment your hard drive on a regular basis. If you run Windows 7’s Disk Defragmenter program every couple of weeks, your drive will spend less time spinning around looking for data.


• Replace your hard drive with an SSD. Because they have no moving parts, SSDs use less power than hard drives. They also don’t need to be defragmented.


• Add more RAM. Going from 2 to 4GB or 4 to 8GB of RAM should allow your computer to use less virtual memory and more physical memory, which means fewer hard drive accesses.

10. Turn off visual effects.

Such visual effects as Aero glass, showing window contents while dragging, and slide-out menus tax your CPU and, by extension, your battery.

To disable these effects:

• Type Advanced System Settings into the Start Menu text field.


• Select “View advanced system settings.”


• Click Settings under Performance.


• Select “Adjust for best performance.”


• Click OK.

Increase Your Windows 7 Laptop’s Battery Life

There are some measures you need to take to protect your data before you pass off your iPhone or Android smartphone. While most phones, in general, are pretty good at securely removing your data when you’re done with the device. There are still some measures you need to take to protect yourself before you pass the handset off, though.

What everyone should do

No matter what type of smartphone you use, there are a few basic things you should check outside of wiping your phone:

• Remove your sim card: While most of the data that you store is kept on your internal storage or microSD card, it’s still possible for contacts or call logs to be kept on your sim card. The person you’re selling it to has no need for this, so always be sure to remove it.


• Remove your microSD card: Similarly, if your phone has a microSD card, chances are you don’t really want or need to give it away. To truly ensure that the data on your micro SD card is secure, keep it to yourself.


• Erase and format your SD card: If you absolutely have to include your microSD card with your phone, then you’ll at least want to erase and format it. You can usually do this via the Settings app. You can also do it by connecting it to a PC, but if you format it with the wrong file system for your phone, it might not recognize the card. Again, though, the best way to secure your data is to keep your card.

Assuming you’ve taken care of all this, the only thing that’s left should be your device’s internal storage. iOS and Android have slightly different ways of handling this, but both are mostly straightforward.

How to securely wipe your phone

For the rest of this, we’re going to talk about how to secure your internal storage, but first it’s worth explaining a bit about how flash memory works. As you’re probably aware with normal platter hard drives, data isn’t really erased when you delete something. The internal flash memory in your smartphone isn’t quite the same. Because it’s not a magnetic storage medium, the methods used to recover data on an old hard drive won’t be the same as tools to pull from your phone. Among other things, this means that while rewriting data seven times is a standard method for erasing magnetic media, it won’t do much to make your data more secure.

That being said, for most of the average user’s needs, your phone already has the tools built in to securely erase your phone’s data. If you carry military secrets around on your unprotected Galaxy S4, well.. for starters, you probably shouldn’t. But if you do, you should probably consult someone with a PhD in something before you lose your phone in a bar. Everyone else may continue

iOS: Use the default erase setting

For iOS users, your job is pretty simple. The iPhone has built-in options that securely erase your phone. On old phones, it goes through a long secure erase process, but on the iPhone 3GS and iOS 3.0, Apple moved to hardware encryption on its phones. From that point on, all data you store on the internal storage (which, aside from anything on the sim card, is everything) is automatically encrypted. Your phone uses a device-specific key that’s never stored anywhere but your handset.

When supported iOS devices wipe your phone, what’s really happening is that the hardware-specific encryption key is securely wiped. Everything else on your phone is left an unintelligible mess, even if someone were to use a fancy forensics lab to physically examine the memory chips which 99% of you will probably never have to deal with.

So what do you need to do to securely erase your phone? Just head to Settings > General > Reset > Erase all Content and Settings.

That’s it. On any iPhone including or following the iPhone 3GS (as well as all iPads and any iPod Touch 3rd generation and later), this will use the hardware encryption method described above. It will be very fast, yet still leave your data secure. For any older devices, the process will actually take a lot longer, as iOS will overwrite all of your data with random information to prevent it from being read later. Either way, though, this should be as secure of a wipe as you can get.

Android: Encrypt your phone, then erase

Android phones are set up a little differently from iPhones (shocker, I know), and they vary somewhat from manufacturer to manufacturer. However, in general the default options are mostly secure.

Unlike the iPhone, Android encryption is not done on a hardware level. For starters, this means if you want to have your phone encrypted, you’ll need to enable it manually in Settings. This process will take a while and, from then on, you’ll need to enter a PIN when you first boot your phone (not to be confused with your lock screen PIN). It can also cause some slight performance decreases, so keep that in mind. This process also can’t be reversed without wiping your phone, so consider carefully before you commit.

Now, on Android, you have two options for wiping your phone: you can either do a factory reset (located in different places depending on your phone, but should be under something like “Backup & reset“) which will wipe everything you’ve ever stored in any user-accessible area of storage. For most people, this will be enough to ensure that no one will be able to access data you’ve ever stored.

How effective a basic wipe is can depend on how well the manufacturer implemented its factory wipe. But some manufacturers’ methods can still leave behind recoverable data. Additionally, if you root your phone and use a custom recovery, wiping via the recovery might not do everything properly.

While, ideally, you shouldn’t have to overwrite your phone to erase data using a factory reset, if you’re unsure or want to be extra safe, encrypting your phone (usually found in Settings under “Security”) before wiping it can provide some reassurance. Just be aware that it may be redundant on certain phones. Still, better safe than sorry.

Of course, the last line of defense before you sell your phone is to vet your buyer. If you’re using a CDMA device, be sure to deactivate your phone with your carrier before handing it off. And while you’re at it, make sure you’ve taken care of your phone and are selling it for as much as possible.

 

The must-dos while Selling your smartphone

Safegaurd Your Android Device

While it’s true that Android is a little more susceptible to malware attacks than iOS, you can make your device impervious to even the most dastardly of digital assaults. Here’s how.

Set a lock screen

Yes, Android lock screens seem to be about as secure as Sony’s Playstation Network, but they do offer at least some security against casual attacks.

Install an anti-malware programme

Just like on a Windows machine, some kind of anti-virus software is handy. It’s the second line of defence and there are a number of anti-malware apps available.

Don’t cache passwords

It’s annoying, but true. Caching passwords, while incredibly handy, is also a godsend to anyone who steals your phone. Of course, security measures like lock screens help, but the only foolproof method of protecting those passwords is not to save them. (Oh, and turn on two-factor authentication while you’re at it.)

Check your SuperUser privileges

If you’ve made the choice to root your Android device, you’ll need to be extra careful about security. A malicious app with root access would be dangerous – able to do basically anything to your phone, without your knowledge

Ensure you only install apps from trusted sources

One of the most common methods of infection on Android is downloads of dodgy apps. Just double-check the software you install.

Safegaurd Your Android Device