Tag Archives: PC Magazine

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Extending Your Laptop’s Battery Life

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PC Magazine has a great article on extending your laptop’s battery life. The article contains suggestions that we are all familiar with such as dimming your screen and not using the DVD drive. However the article also contains more substantive tips.

Some of these include:

  1. Turn off ports. Disabling unused ports and components, such as VGA, Ethernet, PCMCIA, USB, and yes, your wireless, too. You can do this through the Device Manager or by configuring a separate hardware profile (see next step).
  2. Create Power-Saving Hardware Profiles. Configure your laptop for the various scenarios in which you use it (on a plane, at the coffee shop, at the office, and so on). You can do this through the Hardware Profiles menu by right-clicking on My Computer and selecting Preferences or by using a freeware utility such as SparkleXP (for Windows XP users).
  3. Configure your display to turn off when not in use. This is different from just using a screensaver, because in many cases a screensaver still requires the display’s backlight to be on. You can set the interval to turn the display off in Windows’ Power Options—found in the Control Panel.

The article contains several more tips, all of which will help you extend your laptop’s battery life. i urge you to check it out.

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More Backup Suggestions

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I cannot suggest often enough that you need to have a good backup plan in place. I know Ross Kodner has written on this topic, which he calls the most boring topic in legal technology, multiple times.

Certainly, this is not the most exciting topic around. However, WHEN you have a hard drive fail, you will either be very happy that you had a backup or you will curse yourself for not having one. Trust me, the first emotion is much better.

PC Magazine has a good summary article on the best backup tools available.  The article provides great information of the various backup methods available, as well as the pros and cons of each. Plus, the article discusses specific products, both hardware and software that will allow you to accomplish your backup goals.

This is another great article from PC Magazine. If you have not yet implimented a backup solution for both your home and work computers, you need to change that right now. The PC Magazine article gives you to the tools to do that.

A tip of the hat to the Affinity Law Office Technology Blog for pointing out this article.