Any IT officer who has to be working with a laptop for a long time will tell you life with a machine which is easy to have a screw loose isn't always easy. As a IT worker with a keyboard permanently propped up on my thighs (just like right now on an airplane bound for Los Angeles), I've got a few hints and tips for extending the life of your laptop and easing the pain of the never-ending outlet and hotspot hunt.
How to extend your battery life? What impact laptop productivity on the cold, cruel and electrical outletless road? It often depends entirely on how much juice you've got left. For one thing, the screen draws the most power from your laptop battery. When I don't have access to an outlet, I would dim my screen to the lowest setting to make my Dell 1525 battery last as long as possible.
Also, disable unnecessary CPU-cycle-eating processes - like auto Bluetooth device and wifi network detection - to save juice and make your battery last longer.
Take care of your keyboard and screen. There is sand at the beach house, there are crumbs at the coffee shop, and right now your fingers are covered in Dorito dust. Protect the keyboard with a protective cover from stray crumbage getting into the cracks. Use a piece of rubberized shelf liner cut to fit inside your lappie like the bologna in a sandwich when you shut it to prevent screen scrapes. Some people use a thin piece of cloth.
If your laptop keys are already sticky and furry, give it a good cleaning with some compressed air, cotton swabs and elbow grease.
Keep your machine cool. After running an hour or so, a laptop can burn one's thighs or wrists. To solve this problem, get material that doesn't conduct heat well between your skin and your laptop, like a lap desk.
Work offline. Web-based email's great, but the dream of always-on Internet connectivity hasn't yet come true. Get yourself set up to work offline on your laptop on the plane and other wifi-less locations.
For example, Mozilla Thunderbird is a must-have install on your laptop. In addition to downloading all your mail locally for working with offline, Thunderbird 1.5 has excellent SMTP management so you can switch which server you send your mail through when you get online very quickly. Using a NetZero dialup account that requires you use smtp.netzero.net? Need to use the secure SMTP server at the office for work mail? No problem. You can set up multiple SMTP servers and associate them with different email accounts with Thunderbird.
For more on working offline or with a super-slow connection, check out previously-posted feature How to survive a slow internet connection.
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