Alright, show of hands, who has run out of laptop battery life at the absolute WORST time? Was it on a long plane flight, in the middle of the boredom-reducing movie you were playing? Was it during a presentation? Was it during a long email? Whatever the case, the chances are high that at some point, you’ve run out of coveted battery life at the worst time.

Those days could be over! I just found a sweet article over at Lifehacker via FriedBeef.com that has 15 tips on how to suck the most juice out of those little battery bricks. For brevity sake, since you’re a Mobile Warrior and time is of the essence, here are the Top 5 ways to get more battery life, head over and check out the full article for 10 more helpful ways:

“1. Defrag regularly - The faster your hard drive does its work - less demand you are going to put on the hard drive and your battery. Make your hard drive as efficient as possible by defragging it regularly. (but not while it’s on battery of course!) Mac OSX is better built to handle fragmentation so it may not be very applicable for Apple systems.

2. Dim your screen - Most laptops come with the ability to dim your laptop screen. Some even come with ways to modify CPU and cooling performance. Cut them down to the lowest level you can tolerate to squeeze out some extra battery juice.

3. Cut down on programs running in the background. Itunes, Desktop Search, etc. All these add to the CPU load and cut down battery life. Shut down everything that isn’t crucial when you’re on battery.

4. Cut down external devices - USB devices (including your mouse) & WiFi drain down your laptop battery. Remove or shut them down when not in use. It goes without saying that charging other devices (like your iPod) with your laptop when on battery is a surefire way of quickly wiping out the charge on your laptop battery.

5. Add more RAM - This will allow you to process more with the memory your laptop has, rather than relying on virtual memory. Virtual memory results in hard drive use, and is much less power efficient. Note that adding more RAM will consume more energy, so this is most applicable if you do need to run memory intensive programs which actually require heavy usage of virtual memory.”

There you have it! Enjoy the rest of your day, get the most juice you can, and stay mobile!

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