The batteries of today's notebook are made of Lithium Ion Cells where the older batteries used Nickel Cadmium cells or Nickel hydride cells.

These batteries do not long last forever and have a life span of around 3 years. Li-Ion cells have better life compared to the Ni-Cd cells.

If you do not take the proper care of the battery of your laptop then there are chances that its life can cease very soon.

There are some ways to improve your laptop's battery performance:

1. The new notebooks should not be left with their battery discharged for a long time. Leave the notebook fully charged or half charged as leaving it completely discharged for a long time will reduce its charging capacity.

2. DVD or CD drives of the notebook consume much power. If possible use Virtual drives.

3. Also detach USB devices such as pen drive etc, from the notebook when not being used.

4. The Power schemes option helps you to use different Power schemes for optimizing your notebook's battery performance.

Standby and Hibernation modes available in Power schemes can be adjusted in the way you would like to for better performance of your battery.

Power schemes are available in Power Options of Control Panel under Classic View.

5. Use the Power scheme "Max battery" when you do not use any resources on hard disk. For example when you are reading a long Word document and not using any other applications, then you can set this option.

6. High graphics or running games that require more graphics degrade your battery's performance. So try to avoid using high graphics and also adjust the settings of your notebook's screen resolution to a minimum.

7. Multitasking is one factor that can decrease the performance of your battery. So for optimizing your battery's performance avoid multitasking.

8. Using more RAM can make the battery to run for a long time as this compensates the above two factors.

9. Using low screen brightness also accounts in improving the performance of your battery.

10. Calibrate your battery for increasing its performance.

11. Switch off Wifi connection when not in use.

12. Defragmenting hard disk and keeping the hard disk clean improves the performance of your hard disk performance and this in turn improves your battery performance.

These are some of the ways by which you can improve the performance of your battery.

You can visit the blog http://notebook-solutions.blogspot.com for troubleshooting issues that occur with your notebook.