Notebook tips | General notebook maintenance

General laptop maintenance:

Avoid putting your laptop in spaces with high humidity levels, extremely high or low temperatures, vibrations, direct sunlight, or a lot of dust.
Don't leave heavy objects on a Notebook as this may damage the screen.
For good functioning of the touchpad you should occasionally remove dust and greasiness of the surface by using a piece of adhesive tape.
Wipe the Notebook occasionally with a soft, moist towel. Just use a little bit of water. Never use soap or liquid cleaning agents on the screen.
Whenever external connectors are not used, you need to apply the caps that go with these to prevent possible damage by dust or static electricity.
To clean DVD Rom players a special cleaning set is available in the shop. It's a DVD you can put in your DVD Rom player.
Never wrap the electricity lead around your adapter when you put it away.

Never touch the electrical connections of the battery. If you touch these grease may get on it which interferes with the conduction or causes corrosion, or you risk electric shock.
Consider buying a second battery. A battery has a limited operating life and it happens that the type of battery you need is no longer on the market.
Never use another type of battery that seems to fit. This is very bad for your battery as well as your laptop.
A battery discharges by itself (the higher the temperature, the sooner.) So there's no point in fully charging a battery and then putting it away for
“later”.
If you think you won't be using a battery for a while, then charge it up to 98% and recharge it completely after about 3 months (in a cool 25-27 degrees and dry place.
Never leave your battery in the heat or in the cold. Extreme temperatures can seriously shorten the battery's operating life, or even make it useless.
Never charge a battery that feels hot. First wait for it to cool down.
It's best to return old defective batteries to the manufacturer. Here they can be recycled. (sometimes you even get a discount when buying a new one.)

To use your laptop longer without an electric point near, you can use energy control (power management).
You can change the settings of this in BIOS. Your processor for instance will work at a lower pace (more economically) if you don't overload it. When you haven't used your hard drive for a couple of minutes you can switch it off.
Usually settings such as Maximum safe, Maximum performance, etc. have been configured already.
Don't randomly start changing settings, but think over the possible consequences first.
The most energy consuming parts of a laptop are the screen, the CPU, the CD-ROM player and the hard drive. (Usually in this order.)

To lengthen battery operating time you can do one or several of the following things:

Adjust your screen clarity to the lowest possible setting. In that way you do not only save energy, but it will also lengthen the operating life of the "light bulbs".
Switch off your screen when you're away from it for a moment. Or set up a screen saver. (Do try to use an economical screen saver. Windows-logos that move about are not economical: You don't save any energy, you're actually using extra power of your processor. )
Adjust the volume at a lower level or use head phones.
Remove any CD's from the CD-ROM player when you're not using them. In some laptops the CD continuously keeps spinning around which uses up a lot of energy.
Remove PC cards (PCMCIA, Cardbus) when not using them. When you buy these cards check whether they can be adjusted to an energy efficient mode.
When you are not using your computer use the sleep mode or the hibernation (Suspend To Disk) mode, or just switch off your computer.
Switch off the BIOS external connectors (Serial, parallel, infrared, USB, ...) when not using them.