Kelly Curnow, Small Business Community Manager

We all lead busy lives – both professionally and personally. In an effort to help make you more productive and your technology more efficient, I’ll be providing ongoing tech tips.

Tip for increasing your laptop’s battery life: According to Tony Salinas, Dell senior systems engineer and consultant, the single largest consumer of your laptop’s power is the display lamp. The brighter the lamp, the more power is consumed by the system. At higher brightness settings, you only get up to 65 percent of the battery life when compared to reducing the brightness. Because the brightness setting has such a powerful impact on battery life, most laptops are already configured to automatically dim the display as the AC power is removed and to increase the brightness when plugged back into an AC outlet. To save even more power on Dell laptops (Vostro, Latitude, Precision mobile work stations), display brightness can be manually adjusted using the Fn (down) keys on the keyboard. For more tips from Tony, visit this article or video on SB360.