Extend your laptop’s battery life

With proper care, the expensive lithium-ion batteries in your notebook PCs and other portable gear can run well for many, many years.

Common battery-care mistakes will reduce your batteries’ run times and lead to needless environmental waste and costly early replacement.

Heat is the biggest offender to lithium-ion (Li-Ion) batteries. It is best to keep the laptop as a whole as cool as possible by avoiding direct sunlight, leaving the laptop on while storing it in a bag, or leaving the battery in while it is plugged in and already at full charge. When your laptop is running on AC power, it’s recommended to remove the battery pack and store it in a cool place, like the refrigerator (in tightly wrapped plastic bag). Low temperatures stall the inevitable and irreversible chemical changes that occur in Li-ion batteries.

In fact, if your laptop is mostly run off household AC power, you can greatly extend the life of its Li-ion battery by following the 40/40 rule: Run the battery down to about 40% of maximum charge then store it at 40 degrees Fahrenheit (in your fridge).
If you can, avoid running Li-ion batteries all the way down. It used to be recommended to run the battery all the way down, but that has changed with the Li-ion batteries.  It is best for the battery to be used between 40-100% of the charge.
Even when you are careful about the battery, your battery will still eventually go bad from normal wear and tear.

Most people purchase spare batteries, but it is best to wait until you really need one for heavy mobile usage or you will have the same problem with it wearing out before it is needed.  If you do have a spare battery, store it in the fridge with about a 40% charge when it’s not in use.

It is important to check the manufactured date on the battery pack when buying a replacement.  It could have been on the shelf for a couple years, which defeats the purpose of buying it.
If carefully taken care of, you can get 300-500 charges from a battery and a happy battery life.
These two excellent articles provide more information on Li-Ion battery life:

• How to prolong lithium-based batteries from BatteryUniversity.com

• The care and feeding of Li-ion batteries from TechRepublic.com

Have a dead laptop battery or two? Give it to me and I will recycle it properly for you! I can also provide replacement batteries for your laptop.

The Truth About Windows 7

Windows 7 will be released soon and bringing with it an injection of much needed new life for the IT world this October. Microsoft did themselves several favors with this upcoming new release. It is everything Windows Vista should have been, and much, much more. I can’t wait.

Windows 7 will be delivering everything that speedy Windows XP was, with the few added features from Windows Vista in a much slimmed down format, and will especially boast more security than Windows XP and faster response than Windows Vista.

The feeling of “this is a good thing” only happens once every so often in the computing world, and with Microsoft feeling slightly disappointed by the sales of Windows Vista, they have poured everything they could into making Windows 7 the new dream product that everyone should try out at least once, and it shows, it really does.

Some of the new improvements include much more realistic system requirements. Windows Vista really needed a lot of grunt to get it working at full speed, but Windows 7 will be much more reasonable, though the more system memory you give it, the more Windows 7 will be able to work for you more efficiently.

Just like Windows Vista, it will come in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. What does this mean? It simply means if you just want to browse the web, send some emails or listen to music, then you can do that. If you need a little extra processing power for image or video editing, playing games or just like to push the limits of your programs, now you will be able to do that too.

Other nifty features include built-in native handwriting recognition, which goes hand in hand with Windows 7’s increased support for touch devices such as tablet and touch screen PCs. Those using netbooks with Solid State Drives, or if you have an SSD in your desktop machine, Windows 7 includes all the latest support to fully take advantage of and self-optimize itself to work best using the new hard drives.

There will also be a built-in Windows XP Mode which will provide near full compatibility with all your existing software and hardware drivers by actually running a virtual “pretend” version of Windows XP at the same time as running Windows 7.

Other great changes include improved boot/start up times and streamlined features to ensure maximum speed and response during your work and play. A few old favorites are removed, but are available separately as part of Microsoft’s Windows Live suite.

So, will Windows 7 be a new challenger to the devoted Mac and Linux market share, or will it be another Windows Vista. Only time will tell, but things are looking like Windows 7 will be good. Really good. It is showing great potential and is proving itself to be a very worthwhile investment for your computer.

For more information on Windows 7, or purchasing a new computer with Windows 7 pre-loaded, or upgrading to Windows 7, please feel free to contact me.

Finally, A Replacement for Vista and XP

It looks like Windows 7 is coming out very soon! Microsoft released the Release Candidate of Windows 7 last month and usually when they do this, the final release comes out 3-5 months later. I downloaded and installed the Release Candidate for Windows 7, which is publicly available to anyone who wishes to try it out (I do not recommend doing so on production computers).

The download should be available until at least June 2009. The software, however, is time-bomb trial-ware which will disable itself on June 1, 2010.

I installed it on my main desktop computer onto a secondary partition and configured it in such a way that it dual boots both my primary/production Vista OS and my Windows 7 Release Candidate OS. I have been playing around with it for about 2 weeks off and on. I can say that this new operating system will finally be a replacement for Windows Vista and Windows XP. I can tell the difference in performance and usability, even on the same machine, when doing similar tasks in both Vista and 7. It is stable, solid, clean, and feels very fast.  It uses a lot less hardware resources than Vista or even XP and puts all the computing power at the forefront for the user’s disposal rather than using it all up for its own thing. It resembles Vista a bit, and was built on the Vista core, but feels less flashy and more modest.  Applications that run on Vista should run on Windows 7, and hardware that runs Vista will run Windows 7. There are also several compatibility options for Windows XP-era applications as well.

One of the goals of Microsoft was to improve the performance from Vista, and they have addressed this by both increasing the speed of the OS and by developing features that help the user operate more efficiently.
Overall, Microsoft worked on providing a fundamentally secure platform, helping secure anywhere access, protecting users and infrastructure, and helping protect data.

There are many new features to explore, but here is a quick bullet point list of some of the highlights:

• Improved desktop search
• Internet Explorer 8 for improved Internet security
• DirectAccess (automatically connect remote workstations to Windows Server 2008)
• BranchCache (used to sync files between corporate and branch offices)
• Improved BitLocker (drive encryption)
• BitLocker To Go (encrypt portable devices such as USB keys)
• Built-in Biometric support
• Improved taskbar
• Improved device management
• Better compatibility for both hardware and software
• Windows Touch (for touch screen enabled monitors)
• Tight integration with Windows Live online services
• Remote media streaming
• PlayTo
• Windows Media Center improvements

Before the Release Candidate was released, Microsoft fixed over 2,000 bugs that were reported by beta testers (including me). With the success of the Release Candidate, I have already decided that I will be upgrading to Windows 7 on both my production workstation and my laptop as soon as it comes to market. I’m not even worried about application compatibility or hardware compatibility as all of my applications already work fine in the RC and anything that runs in Vista should run in Windows 7 with no problems. My computers will feel like new computers again with the performance, reliability, stability, security enhancements that Windows 7 offers over XP or Vista.

Additional Microsoft Resources

Videos: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/videos.aspx
Windows 7 Home: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/default.aspx
New Features: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/whats-new.aspx

The Importance of Backups

Do you regularly backup your data? I cannot stress the importance of regular backups simply because it’s not a matter of if your computer or server’s hard drive will fail, it’s a matter of when. Also of equal importance are regular backup checks. Do you really know if your backups are actually backing up? Check out this great article, courtesy of pcmag.com.

Simplify Your Online Logins

RoboForm is software that literally does the grunt work of remembering your online logins and passwords. It also automatically logs you in to websites. Sure, Internet Explorer and FireFox have password remembering features, but RoboForm takes it a step further with automatic website navigation, logging in, and even form filling – all with full, encrypted security. With form-filling, you don’t have to type your address or shipping information when you place online orders, ever again. I have been using this software for years and highly recommend it. Check it out, there’s a free 30-day trial.