You may have a very high-end laptop with lots of RAM, latest processor chip and an extremely powerful graphics card but still the battery inside your laptop computer or Tablet PC remains the weakest link – the average battery life is anywhere between three and four hours for most notebook models.

Whether we are traveling on the road or waiting in the airport lounge or taking a long flight (where there are no power plugs to recharge the battery), our most common wish is that the laptop battery should last as long as possible so that we remain connected, informed and productive.

Here are some simple yet effective tips that will help you extract the maximum juice out of your laptop batter per charge (though nothing substitutes carrying a spare full-charged battery):

Dim the Bright LCD Screen – Turn down the brightness level of your laptop screen to the lowest value possible. Similarly, lower the screen resolution and color depth as they again put stress on the display card and therefore consume additional power of your battery.

Turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Scanning - If you are using the laptop for offline work, like composing emails or giving final touches to that PowerPoint presentation, there’s no point checking for Wi-Fi network in your area when you are not going to use it anyway. Most laptops have shortcut keys to instantly disable wireless networking.

Disable Background Processes – You could have several maintenance related processes running on your hard-drive which can be turned off temporarily. Examples include the desktop search software that’s configured to index new files on the fly or any IM clients sitting in the system tray or any scheduled tasks that auto-run at pre-defined intervals.

Defragment the Hard Disk – Defragmenting will try to put all the piece of a file in a sequence so it will take less effort to see a file. You may notice a marginal jump in computing speed after defragmentation plus it also helps in extending the very precious life of your battery.

Turn off the Auto-save document feature of Microsoft Office and other applications. Programs that are run from a CD or DVD can be copied to and run from the hard drive, which typically consumes less power than an optical drive.

Also remember to fully charge a new battery pack before carrying it with you on an important business trip. New batteries should be fully charged and discharged a few times before they work to their maximum capacity.

Make your Laptop Battery Last Longer