5 Tips to prolong your notebook battery life

Notebooks these days have battery's that claim to last for hours and hours. The Macbooks are generally really good with their long life and the latest Windows pc's are also getting better. A colleague recently replaced is default factory fitted battery with a long life battery in his HP notebook. The battery is giving him a couple of hours now. This brought on a Google search for tips to prolong battery life without buying a new battery.

I came across this article from the guys at DailyFive. DailyFive is in their own words "...the simplest way to read and share breaking tech news, reviews and features on your mobile device. Whether it has buttons or batteries, it's in our backyard." You can get their app from here DailyFive.

They suggest five different ways to prolong your battery life.

1. Dim your screen - most of the notebooks these days have power-efficient LED displays but if you are using a slightly older model, dim your display. This simple step could save you a couple of extra minutes.
2. Change your drive - conventional hard drives uses more power spinning those platters than a solid state disk, SSD, does. By changing your disk you could see a saving of up to 30 minutes.
3. Wi-Fi switch - if you not using your wi-fi then switch it off, either with the physical switch or by using the software. It doesn't make sense to have it on if you are not using it. The same goes for Bluetooth. You can switch your Bluetooth off independently of your wi-fi.
4. Upgrade your software - the newer operating systems are far more power efficient and are getting better with each release so consider upgrading to the latest software.
5. Modern day circuitry and chargers mean in it is fine to leave the computer connected to the charger. It is recommended to try and prevent the battery from discharging unnecessarily but once every 4 weeks let the battery discharge fully and leave it for a couple of hours and then follow it up with a full recharge.

There are many other ways to prolong the life of your battery and most of them are inexpensive and easy to do. Windows has a power options function that you can customise what the computer does when on battery and this will also go a long way in increasing the life of your battery.

Thanks again to the guys at DailyFive for the short and concise articles. Go get the app for yourself.

Related articles

• Best Battery Life: 10 Laptops That Last 7+ Hours [Laptops]
• How To Make Your Phone's Battery Last Longer And Hold More Juice
• MacBook Pro Mountain Lion Battery Life: 10.7 vs 10.8 vs 10.8.1
• Extending your laptop's battery life

Facebook's Timeline

Image via CrunchBase

Facebook has launched their new timeline visual approach to their user profiles. Initially I was not taken with the new lay-out but I have since begun to like it. It is certainly a big change from the existing profile lay-out. The lay-out of old seems to be so bland and boring now.

A nice feature on the timeline is the cover. This graphic is like the book cover to your profile and is a nice big space to show a picture of whatever you want compared to the small profile picture we have had for so long. It is still good to see the profile picture has remained but does take on a slightly less important role now.

The rest of the page is divided into two main columns by a dividing line, representing the passing of time, hence the timeline look and feel. This allows to include milestones or life events and you can record your life’s history easier than ever before.

All those links you used to have on the left hand side of the page have not disappeared they are just displayed elsewhere. There are now a couple of tabs displayed just under the cover picture. These tabs can be expanded by clicking on the little down arrow on the right hand side. What this means is that only three tabs will be displayed at any given time. This gives a bit more life to your profile as the tabs rotate through.

If you have a post that you wish to make more prominent you can select the post and highlight it. This will make your post appear across the entire page and give it more presence.  Also posts that have more comments / shares get a bigger portion of the page. It is a nice way of seeing at a glance which post got the most action.

The timeline is now available to those who have Facebook pages for their businesses or other reasons. The mandatory cutover date is 30 March 2012 to the timeline for pages. The timeline for pages will affect businesses in a big way.

Business will be able to place more branding images on the page now, think of a big Coca-Cola image on the cover picture and the bottle of Coke as the profile picture. Businesses will be able to make use of the milestones feature by way of promotions, specials, product launches. The will be able to build the brand better and engage with customers.

The ability for a page admin to take a message and turn it into a private messaging session with a customer will allow far deeper communication than ever before. Marketers will need to re-think their strategy on which tabs display above the ‘fold’ as this will be the first thing customers will see when landing on the business page.

It should all make for some interesting changes in the way we see people’s lives and businesses unfold in real time. Let me know what you think of the new Facebook timeline on my facebook page TechNOBLEgyIT.

Related articles

• Facebook launches timeline for pages (sujithselvan.wordpress.com)
• New Facebook Page Timelines Are Here (socialfresh.com)
• Facebook brings Timeline to brand pages (technologytell.com)

Password construction and management

Passwords are the first line of security in many applications and used by everyone every day. Passwords give access to such a vast array of services like Internet banking, Facebook, Twitter and even your pc (for those that have a password).

Keeping track of all these passwords can become very difficult and to have a different unique password for each and every application is near impossible, so what is one to do? There are a number of options available but before that lets go over some absolute no-no’s when dealing with passwords.

Do not write the password(s) down on anything and do not leave the post-it note with your password stuck to your monitor or underneath the laptop. Apart from breaking the first rule why bother having a password.

Try not to use family names, favourite sports team, pets or birthdates as your password. With the increase in use of Facebook and other social media it is very common these days for people to put such personal information onto the web and for a hacker this is the easiest place to start when trying to access your account.

Passwords should be as complex as possible, but this brings its own complexity t it. If you make the password to difficult you will either forget it or you end up writing it down, breaking rule 1. A possible solution is creating your own unique formula for passwords.

Facebook password could be something like Fr13nd$456 and Twitter maybe B1rd!35, by associating the site with what you do on it can help you create a unique password that meets the general norms of strong password creation.

Creating strong passwords normally require a mixture of the following:

1.       Be Alphanumeric (letters and numbers)

2.       Contain a special character (!, @, %, etc...)

3.       Be at least 7 characters or more in length (the longer the better)

4.       Refrain from using normal words found in a dictionary

Trying to manage passwords is difficult and most people do get lazy and set one password for every site. This may be fine if you have a very strong password but remember if you have password for all it is like having a master key to everything.

Another tip when setting up new accounts or registering for something on a page and you need to answer a personal question in case you forget your password, do not put the real answer. So if you select your personal question to be your mothers’ maiden name, use your grandmother’s name instead. Just doing something a little extra will help protect yourself that much more.

7 Handy tips for Blackberry

Here are 7 handy tips to make using your Blackberry that much easier.

1. Using the QWERTY keyboard is great but is a pain looking for the . or putting in the ' but Blackberry will do this for you. All you need to is press the spacebar twice at the end of your sentence it will automatically put the full stop and make the next letter a Capital. If you want to put in the ' as in I'll then just type il. Other abbreviations are wel for we'll and isnt for isn't.
2. You do not always need to press Shift for upper case letters, just press and hold down the letter it will then change to uppper case.
3. Want to type an e-mail address faster without using the @ symbol. Type out the address and hit space where the @ should be, then space again for the . in the domain. i.e. john thepub com for john@thepub.com. This works for URL's as well.
4. Want to search for something in your messages? Press S and you can search from there
5. Multitasking in Blackberry is very subtle and you often end up with numerous apps running. If you want to see which apps are running, hold down the Menu key. You can switch to applications from here too.
6. You can prolong the life in your battery by using the auto on/off function. Choose Options > Device > Auto On/Off; you can have different on and off times for weekdays and weekends.
7. Here is a nifty little feature, press Alt + Caps + H and you can view information like the signal strength, battery level, device pin, free space, space in use, IMEI, OS version and how long the Blackberry has been on for.

The above tips work on a Blackberry Torch 9800 so shortcuts and menus may vary on different models but the functionality is still there.