Conditioning and Charging the Battery and Increasing Battery for your Laptop

Your laptop is equipped with a Lithium Ion (Li-Ion) battery, and, while it has been programmed to save power whenever and however possible, you'll have to initially condition your battery, as well as recharge it from time to time. Use the following tips to obtain the best condition for your battery and extend its rundown time.

Conditioning the Battery

If your battery is brand new, and you are using it for the first time, it may not be charged to full capacity. To obtain maximum battery performance, cycle the battery three times. To do this, plug your laptop into a standard electrical outlet to fully charge the machine, then run the laptop off the battery until it is fully discharged. (This procedure is also recommended if you have stored the battery for a few months.)

Tips for Charging the Battery

Do not charge the battery until it is completely out of power. (Check the small green battery-shaped icon on the right-hand side of your laptop's taskbar to check your machine's current battery capacity.) Partial charge or discharge may cause a degradation of your laptop's performance.

Once you have started charging the battery pack, do not use it until it is fully charged.
Increasing the Life of Your Battery

You can also use the following "power management" techniques to help extend the life of your battery:

Suspend mode (Fn+F4) - Although your laptop appears to be powered down when it's in suspend mode, the machine's memory contents are actually kept active at very low power. You can bring your machine out of suspend mode by pressing any key. Your laptop can remain in suspend mode for about three days before the battery is drained.

Hibernation mode (Fn + F12) - This mode uses no power until you restart your laptop; the machine stores its active memory to the hard disk and then turns off the ThinkPad. Entering a single keystroke should bring it back up, without the need to reboot. Your laptop can remain in hibernation mode indefinitely..
Another Helpful Security-Related Tip

As long as we're talking about viruses, here's a simple step you can take to make sure that you don't open a certain type of file, such as one that may contain a virus: show the filename extensions on your laptop!

To do this, first double-click on the My Computer or Windows Explorer icon on your machine's desktop, and select a disk (for example, your C: hard drive). Pull down the View menu and select Folder Options… In the separate View Options window that appears, left-click on the View tab, and select the Show all files option (if it isn't selected already). Finally, ensure that a checkmark does not appear to the left of the "Hide file extensions for known file types" option.

As we mentioned before, taking this precaution is really important when you don't want to open a certain type of file, especially to avoid spreading a virus. A good example is with the Anna Kournikova virus that has affected campus in the past; if you don't show filename extensions on your machine, the virus file appears as a simple .JPEG file, and you don't see that the file really has the .VBS extension.

So, do yourself a favor and take a minute to show the complete file extensions on your laptop!