Is it possible to prolong the battery life on my laptop as when fully charged it only has a battery life of 2 hours max,

What can I do to make it last longer? or can't I?

For use at a Disco, run it from the Mains Adaptor / Charger, rather than the battery .

If you are talking about non disco, portable use, then it may be that the battery needs replacing. After many charge / discharge cycles the gel / chemicles inside the battery can become tired, and you find that the battery only holds a percentage of charge that it did when new. The percentage that it holds and therefore the run time will reduce gradually as the battery gets older .

There are a couple of things that you can do to make the battery last a little longer:-

(1) Avoid using a lot of USB connected devices, these draw power from the laptop when in use

(2) Avoid excessive use of the CDROM / Floppy drives, these consume a large amount of power

(3) Set the Power Saving / sleep features in your Windows Control panel, to their minimum settings. This includes cutting off screensavers, Display, Hard Drive etc after a period of keyboard inactivity.

If you battery doesn't appear to be holding its charge very well, then try a few consistant charge / recharge cycles. This means charging the battery until its full, then running the laptop until it automatically shuts down. Repeat this a few times, always remembering to charge the battery fully and then discharge it fully. This can sometimes improve the charge rentention.

If you are mainly using your laptop from mains , prolong the shelf life of the battery by storing it charged and placed inside a plastic tub with a lid and place it inside your fridge , this slow's down the chemical degridation? , photographers store new camera films the same way.

Just remember to give the battery time to fully warm up before using.

What type of chemicals are in the battery? - it should say one of the following.


Nickle-Cadnium - Rare nowadays, however, cheap, and layered with problems.

Nickle-metal Hydride - Common, reasonably cheap - fewer problems.

Lithium Ion - becoming more common - expensive, but really good.

My new laptop came with the instructions

Both my laptop batteries have died, so I can only use one on mains all the time and the other one doesn't last too long, however as the completely knackered one is on my gig rig it doesn't bother me as I am on AC power all the time, which is why it has died anyway, and as the second battery woulkd cost me about £120 I can live with it being plugged in most of the time.