Caring For Your Laptop

Caring for your laptop means keeping it in good condition cosmetically and keeping it running well, this also means it should increase the laptops longevity .

This is because they know that if a laptops battery is charged and discharged frequently  it will gradually hold less and less charge until it fails.

The best way around this is to simply keep it fully charged as much as possible and only use the laptop without the power when you really have to.

And when you have to use the laptop on battery power use one of the laptops power saving schemes to make the battery last as long as possible.

There are also other things that can be done to increase the battery life such as disabling unneeded hardware, more here on this and other battery saving tips

The next setting we need to change is the screen timeout.

A laptops screen should last around 50,000 hours which is great as it means it should last around 17 years, if you used it 8 days a week, 365 days per year, but the problem is other technology around the screen which seems to fail.

By setting just the screen to power off if not used for around 10 minutes is a good way of caring for your laptop as means you could extend the screens life by quite a way.

Hardware Care
Keep the laptop clean by using a damp kitchen towel to remove any dust or dirt.

Use external devices such as an external keyboard and mouse, even an external monitor if possible.

If you look around you should be able to get a docking station or port replicator for your laptop this will enable you to plug any devices directly into this, then you simply place the laptop into the docking station, this means you don’t need to remove or plug all the devices into the laptop every time you need to use it or remove it.

It’s a good idea to periodically ensure that all vents are free of fluff and dust as this can build up over time causing cooling issues. More on this

Using a laptop as a desktop with a port replicator

Software Care
A really good, but much overlooked way of caring for your laptop is preventative maintenance, this involves.

A disk cleanup to remove temp files.

Defragmenting the hard drive, this will ensure all files are stored in one location as opposed to being broken down and saved in multiple locations, which makes loading times very slow.

Checkdisk, Windows comes with an error checking application called CheckDisk or CHKDSK,

this will check to make sure Windows has no problems and can be very useful in fixing problems before they can actually start causing bigger problems.

A good registry cleaner which will remove any invalid registry entries.

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Cleaning your laptop from top to bottom

computer adviser caring for your laptop article