Power saving tips for your battery hungry gadgets
Watch Movies from hard drive, not DVDs
Watch movies from hard drives, not DVDs Simple, sure, but not always obvious. On many planes and trains, laptops serve as little more than portable DVD players with bigger screens, but forcing your laptop to spin the discs and read from them eats up more power than reading a file off a hard disk—or, perhaps even better, a USB drive. How to get there? There are a few easy programs that can move those movies from the battery hungry dvd player to the sleek hard drive. Including slysoft copydvd and there anydvd encryption software. Handbrake is also another helpful software program as well.
Recalibrate a laptop battery to regain life
It's a shame, but laptop batteries can lie to you about how much juice they have, or can really hold. The New York Times explains in a Q & A (look halfway down the page) the most straight-forward means of getting the real truth. Turn off all your interrupting apps, like screensavers and the like, put your computer to sleep, and plug it in until you know it's good and charged. Then turn it back on, make sure your power settings are such that the system won't try to sleep or hibernate, then run your computer all the way down on battery power. Charge it back up one more time, and you'll know whether you really need to start shopping at Laptop Battery Express, Laptops for Less, or check with your manufacturer to get a new lithium stick.
Turn C batteries into Ds with quarters
Only a few things ever need D batteries, but who has them handy when you need those things? If you've got some slightly more handy C batteries around, you only need a few quarters to turn them into makeshift Ds. You won't get the same longevity, and you'll have to part with up to $1.50 for a bit, but it works, and it might just turn you into the family hero when you rescue that seemingly useless big-lens flashlight.
I grabbed these from a special from lifehacker. I picked these out, as there not the more obvious tips. Check out the originial article here at lifehacker
