Laptop Battery

hi

Just bought a laptop off a friend for a reasonable price, however, part of the sale agreement was that i would need to byu a new battery cos the current one only lasts around 20 minutes (!) anyway, its got windows XP home installed on it. I was wondering what settings i should change to get the power to alst as logn as possible (it my first laptop) and also, can anyone source a replacement for the current battery. All i can find out about it is that its a 34BS1, the chemistry is "lilo" and its an OEM.

Any help appreciated
Falcon

Which CPU is it? I know mobile AMD chips can be tweked bt a program called SpeedSwitch.
Some ways to conserve as much power as possible:
* lower CPU clock rate
* lower graphics performance (if applicable)
* turn off cdrom/floppy/pcmcia devices
* lower screen brightness

Basically turning off anything that isn't needed.

Whats the exact make and model of the laptop, will make finding batter replacements easier.

unfortunatly its a normal P4 2.66Ghz, not a P4M. How do i lower cpu clock rate? you mean from the BIOS? graphics is allready on minumum and the DVD/CD-RW combo is off. is there any pecial windows setitng i can change to cut power usage?

Normally whenever running off the battery the clock speed is automatically reduced. But I dunno about normal P4's (won't they still be multiplier locked?). I've got a XP-M and I use a seperate program to control the speed of the CPU there should be one for the P4 as well

edit: It called SpeedStep, just need to find a decent link

Well, the prog I use (SpeedSwitchXP works for Intel CPU's too :p

However if you're CPU doesn't support speedstep then thats not going to work. Which would mean your only options are under the Power Options control panel applet.

ok, thanks :) anyone know about the battery?

What make and model is the laptop? If we knew that we could help you find a battery.

The manufacturer is Patriot. couldnt tell you the model. but i can tell you the specs (if that helps) Its a P4 2.66 with 256Mb ram (64MB shared with gfx) 20gb HDD, DVDCD-RW conbo and all the trimmings (usb, ethernet, modem etc)

Falcon

Patriot is Pc World's own brand IIRC, they might be able to help you find one

I get all my laptop batteries from these people, v good ;)

http://powerup.computerbatteries.co.uk/

One thing I learned from using laptops constantly is that the batteries reduce their functionality as they get older until they simply don't work. It's just fact of life with laptops. I got roughly a year out of a battery depending on the usage. Though for a significant amount of that time the performance of the battery was pretty poor.

This reduction in functionality is a 'memory' characteristic that exists with NiCad type products ( I know laptop batteries aren't NiCad). If a battery is recharged before it is fully discharged it retains a 'memory' of where it was when it went back on charge and will only run down to that point after a while. It's not a hard and fast level but something that will occur over time.

One way to prolong battery life is to fully discharge them once in use before hooking up a power supply to charge them back up. I leave my batteries out of the case and just work on the power supply until I am in a position in which I need to use the battery. Doing this the battery on my current laptop still has a couple of hours life in it after almost a year this time around.