Category: Laptops

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Batteries Guide Laptops

How to Extend the Life of Your Laptop Battery

Laptop batteries power portable devices but can degrade over time, impacting your laptop’s performance. Understanding how batteries work and what affects their lifespan, diagnosing common issues, and maintaining them can extend their life. This article will guide you on how to repair a laptop battery — optimizing battery performance, exploring upgrade options, and deciding whether to replace or upgrade your battery.

Understanding your battery is key.

Most modern laptops are powered by lithium-ion batteries, which are the industry standard due to their efficiency and reliability. However, these batteries come with a finite number of charge cycles. A charge cycle is defined as a full discharge of the battery from 0% to 100% and then back to 0% again. It’s important to note that partial discharges also contribute to these cycles. For example, using 50% of your battery one day and recharging it, then using 50% the next day, counts as one full charge cycle.

Each charge cycle gradually diminishes the battery’s capacity to hold a charge. When new, a lithium-ion battery might allow you to work for several hours on a single charge, but after numerous cycles, you may notice that your laptop doesn’t last as long. This is a natural ageing process for the battery, as the chemical reactions within it slowly degrade over time.

Understanding this concept can help you better manage your laptop’s battery life. For instance, avoiding full discharges and instead keeping your battery between 20% and 80% can significantly extend its lifespan. Employing features like Battery Saver mode can reduce the number of cycles your battery undergoes, helping to preserve its capacity.

By taking care of your battery and being mindful of its charge cycles, you can ensure that your laptop remains reliable and efficient for a longer period.

How To Repair A Laptop Battery

If your laptop battery isn’t performing well post-calibration or shows charging errors or power fluctuations, you may need to repair or replace it. Here’s how you can diagnose and troubleshoot the problem:

  • Use Windows Battery Report: This built-in feature provides a detailed report on your battery’s history and current condition. You can access it by opening the Command Prompt as an administrator, then typing powercfg /batteryreport.
  • Use macOS System Information: This built-in feature summarizes your battery’s health and status. Access it by clicking the Apple menu > About This Mac > System Report > Power.
  • Use BatteryCare software: This free application monitors and optimizes your battery’s performance and health, providing real-time information about your battery’s temperature, discharge rate, wear level, and calibration status.


Common battery problems and solutions include:

  • Battery Not Charging:This could be due to a faulty power adapter, damaged power jack, loose connection, or software glitch. Check and clean the power adapter, power jack, and battery contacts, update your laptop’s BIOS and drivers, and run a system scan with your antivirus.
  • Rapid Battery Drain:This could be caused by high power consumption, excessive heat, or a worn-out battery. Reduce your laptop’s brightness and volume, close unnecessary programs, disable unused devices, use a cooling pad, and check your battery’s wear level and capacity.


If these solutions don’t work, consider DIY battery replacement or professional repair services. DIY replacement is cheaper and faster but requires technical skills and may void your warranty. Professional repair services know for sure how to repair a laptop battery. They are more expensive and time-consuming but ensure quality service and preserve your warranty.

Secrets To Effective Battery Maintenance

To keep your laptop battery in good shape post-repair or replacement, follow these tips:

Optimize Power Settings:Adjust your laptop’s power settings to suit your needs and conserve battery power. Use Windows Power Options or macOS Energy Saver to customize settings like display brightness, sleep and hibernate modes, wireless and Bluetooth connections, and processor speed. Use Windows Battery Saver or macOS Low Power Mode to activate power-saving features when your battery level is low.

Store and Charge Properly:Keep your battery in a cool, dry place away from sunlight, heat, and moisture. Avoid overcharging or undercharging; aim for 40-80% charge most of the time. Don’t use your laptop while it’s charging to avoid generating extra heat and stress for your battery. Once a month, fully charge and discharge your battery to maintain its calibration and capacity.

Keep Your Laptop Cool:High temperatures can harm your battery cells, so keep your laptop ventilated. Don’t place it on soft or uneven surfaces that can block air vents and fans. Use a cooling pad or fan to improve airflow and heat dissipation. Clean your laptop regularly to prevent dust or debris from clogging the vents and fans.

Maximizing Battery Life For Enhanced Performance

Boosting your laptop battery’s lifespan and performance involves using power-saving features, minimizing battery-draining activities, and managing connected devices efficiently. Here’s how:

USE POWER-SAVING FEATURES AND SOFTWARE:

  • Windows Battery Report or macOS System Information: These help monitor and analyze battery usage and health, identifying potential issues or improvements.
  • Windows Task Manager or macOS Activity Monitor: Use them to manage and close unnecessary or resource-intensive programs and processes, freeing up memory and CPU power.
  • Windows Disk Cleanup or macOS Storage Management: These help delete unwanted or temporary files, freeing up disk space.
  • Windows Defender or macOS Security & Privacy: Protect your laptop from threats that may slow down or damage your laptop and battery.
  • BatteryCare or coconutBattery software: Optimize and customize battery performance and settings, like switching power plans, disabling Aero effects, and notifying you when to calibrate your battery.


MINIMIZE BATTERY-DRAINING PROGRAMS AND ACTIVITIES:

  • Games, videos, music: Lower the resolution, frame rate, and quality settings of these programs or use offline or low-power modes to save battery power.
  • Multiple browsers, tabs, and windows: Close unnecessary ones or use extensions or plugins that can suspend or block them.
  • Updating or downloading large files or programs: Postpone or schedule these tasks for later or use a wired or faster connection.


MANAGE EXTERNAL DEVICES AND PERIPHERALS EFFECTIVELY:

  • USB devices: Unplug unnecessary ones or use a powered USB hub to save battery power.
  • Bluetooth devices: Turn off unnecessary ones or use wired or low-energy alternatives.
  • External monitors: Lower the brightness, resolution, and refresh rate, or use a single or smaller screen to save battery power.
  • These steps will help maximize your battery’s life, keep your laptop running smoothly and let avoid the necessity of googling how to repair a laptop battery again.
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Laptops News

Living with the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s

One of the more interesting—and more curious—laptops I’ve tried in a while is the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s, one of the few ARM-based Windows systems on the market. The machine is designed to provide the laptop features we expect with the advantages we expect from phones, such as better battery life and instant on. It does have some nice features, and is a definite improvement from last year’s ThinkPad Flex 5G, but I’m still not convinced that Windows on ARM is ready.

The machine looks like an ultraportable ThinkPad, with a 13.3-inch display, black matte color, magnesium cover, and the familiar red pointing stick in the middle of the keyboard. Measuring 0.53 by 11.8 by 8.13 inches (HWD) and weighing just 2.5 pounds (3.16 pounds with the included 65-watt charger), it’s light and easy to carry.

It doesn’t offer much in the way of ports, however: the left side of the machine has two USB-C ports, but without support for Thunderbolt; and the right side has a SIM socket, a lock, and a headphone/mic jack. No USB-A, no HDMI. There’s a 5MP webcam enclosed in a lip that protrudes from the top of the screen, with a key that physically covers the webcam, though no user-accessible shutter.

Like most of the current ThinkPad series, it has a decent-size touchpad with physical left and right buttons. It has a reasonable keyboard, but it seems a bit shallower than that on other recent ThinkPads I’ve tested.

The X13s has a fingerprint reader embedded in the power button, on the upper right-hand part of the keyboard, though this was problematic. On the other hand, Windows Hello worked quite well with facial recognition.

What makes this unit stand out is the processor, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3. This is an 8-core processor running at a nominal speed of 3GHz, with Qualcomm’s Kryo CPU cores and Adreno 690 graphics, manufactured on a 5nm process, rumored to be made by Samsung. My test model had 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, along with a 13-inch 1920-by-1200 display with the currently popular 16:10 ratio.

Compared with the earlier Snapdragon 8cx in the Flex 5G, this year’s processor is said to be much faster, and now supports 64-bit x86 (Intel or AMD) applications through emulation as well as 32-bit x86 and native ARM applications. It supports Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.1 and includes a Microsoft Pluton TPM architecture for added security.

The good news is that you can run most Windows applications. There are now ARM-based versions of the Microsoft Office suite, so Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, and Edge all work. It does fine with Chrome, Firefox, and Zoom.

It’s notably slower on most benchmarks than I would have expected. Qualcomm has been positioning the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 as competitive with Intel’s Core i5 processor, but I didn’t get performance scores that were anywhere near that (even given that most of the machines I’ve tested lately were Core i7’s so I didn’t expect the scores to be quite as high.) On the Applications test in PC Mark 10, it scores 7862 vs. scores of about 11,000 or higher on Core i7 or Ryzen 7 lightweight x86 notebooks; and it scored less than half as well on Cinebench. Still, in daily use with light-duty tasks, I didn’t notice a lot of difference from running an AMD- or Intel-based laptop.

On more performance-oriented tests, the Snapdragon just didn’t compete. It took the ThinkPad X13s 89 minutes to run a big spreadsheet in Excel (a native ARM application), compared with 41 minutes for the current (Intel-based) X1 Carbon Gen 10. On the X13s, converting a large video using Handbrake took 3 hours and 38 minutes with the native version of the app; and 4 hours and 5 minutes in an emulated 64-bit version, compared with 1 hour and 55 minutes on the X1 Carbon. And a big Matlab model just simply would not run. Bottom line: this isn’t the right machine for you if you run heavy-duty applications.

It’s also a problem if you want Thunderbolt connectivity. I knew the chipset didn’t support Thunderbolt, but I expected such devices to work via USB-C, albeit at lower speeds. That didn’t seem to be the case. It wouldn’t recognize an OWC Aura Thunderbolt drive at all, and while it recognized Lenovo’s Thunderbolt dock, it wouldn’t pass through video signals.

The model I had included a Snapdragon X55 sub-6 5G modem, and the unit came with an AT&T cellular account. I saw download speeds ranging from 50 to 80Mbps and upload speeds ranging from 7 to 21Mbps in New York; in Connecticut, I saw download speeds as low as 17 Mbps and as fast as 131 Mbps. These are fine for most purposes, but hardly exceptional. Cellular connectivity is a relatively rare option on laptops, but there are a variety of other models that do offer it, and I’ve seen similar or better speeds on x86-based machines.

For video conferencing the 5-megapixel webcam over the display was very sharp—better than on most of the ThinkPads I’ve tested lately, but it displayed a yellowish tint and tended to blow out direct lighting behind the screen. Speakers on either side of the keyboard were again fine, but nothing special.

The X13s has a list price of $2,169 with the unit I tested going for $2,309, which seems pretty high; however, as I write this, it’s available on Lenovo’s website for $1,385. Better, but it still seems high for what you’re getting.

What makes the X13s stand out is the ARM processor, which by itself offers somewhat faster resume from sleep and somewhat better battery life, but with the tradeoff of notably worse performance for heavy-duty applications. It’s a tradeoff that only works if you really, really care about getting the best possible battery life.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Replacement Lenovo Laptop Battery

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Laptops

How fast is the Dell XPS 17?

The XPS series is Dell’s most premium, drool-worthy line, making some of the best laptops on the market, and the XPS 17 is the model with the most room for juicy high-end parts. So how much performance can you get out of a super-thin laptop if you throw in the latest Intel Core i7 processor and Nvidia RTX graphics card?

Our review unit of the XPS 17 (9720 model) comes with a 12th-gen Core i7 12700H processor and an RTX 3060 GPU running at 65 watts, all crammed into a beautiful .77-inch chassis. While it’s no “gaming laptop,” instead focusing on productivity and media creation with its gorgeous 4K display, it’s certainly got the chops to run some of the latest high-end titles. But since this is a media creation machine, Gordon focused on more practical tests.

And practical is certainly an apt description of the XPS 17. In tests including Cinebench, PugetBench Photoshop, and PugetBench Premiere Pro, the XPS 17 holds its own against laptops equipped with the same CPU and GPU, sometimes even besting bigger machines with faster graphics cards. Chalk that up to the XPS 17’s more advanced active cooling system, perhaps. With faster DDR5 RAM, the XPS 17 can even beat chunkier designs like the Gigabyte Aero 16 with an RTX 3070 Ti for some intense Adobe applications.

As Gordon explains, the XPS 17 really isn’t designed to be a gaming machine, especially if you’re looking to play in 4K. In 3Dmark Timespy its GPU-focused scores are near the bottom of the pack for similar high-end machines. Even so, it’s an amazing laptop for creating with programs like Photoshop and Premiere, well worth considering if you don’t want to lug around a heavy “gaming” model.