Optimizing Battery Power on Your Laptop

The most basic step you can take to prevent power loss on your mobile PC is to invest in a high quality battery and always keep a spare on hand. Splurging on a quality battery and spare can save you from hours of lost access to your mobile PC.

Battery Care

Once you've invested in a good battery, you need to take care of it. To clean your battery contacts, first turn off and unplug your mobile PC. Remove the battery and wipe its metal contacts and its contacts inside the device with a cotton swab dipped in rubbing alcohol. Let dry completely before reinstalling and reconnecting to a power source. Repeat every two to three months.

Modern lithium ion (Li-Ion) batteries can be recharged and partially discharged time and time again, but you should never fully discharge them. Nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries common to older laptops should be completely drained and recharged every one to three months.

After mastering the basics of battery care, make sure you are utilizing your mobile PC's built in energy saving features.

Optimize Your Power Settings

The hard disk and display on your mobile PC consume the most battery power. Choose a power plan, refered to as a power scheme in Windows XP, to reduce the use of power-hungry functions and lessen screen brightness.

Utilize the following battery-saving states:

• Sleep or Standby
  
  In a sleep state, your hard disk and display turn off, and all open programs and files are saved in Random Access Memory. In case of a crash or power loss, save your work before placing your system in sleep mode. Your mobile PC should wake up quickly from sleep, and your desktop and files should appear just as you left them.
  
  
• Hibernation
  
  When your computer hibernates, it saves everything to its hard disk before shutting down. When you restart, your desktop should be restored exactly as you left it. Hibernation takes a bit longer to wake up from than sleep, but it uses less power.

Further Tips for Lowering Your Energy Use:

• Turn off your wireless device when you're not connected to a wireless network but you're using your mobile PC.
  
  
• Turn off scheduled tasks.
  
  
• Keep the use of tools in the notification bar minimal.
  
  
• Limit power-intensive activities such as gaming, watching a DVD or listening to a CD.
  
  
• Reduce power consumption by adding memory (RAM) to your mobile PC. (See our post on "Low Memory" earlier this month)

Help is Here!

As always, we're here to help!  If you have concerns over your battery charging system or need som guidance in changing the settings we've recommended, feel free to contact us.  We can usually connect remotely, walk through it with you and have you all set in about 15 minutes!  Goto http://www.CrossLoop.com/HelpMeMax to Share your Screen. then give us a call at 847-348-3489, ext. 3.

Tips for Printing Beautiful Digital Photos at Home

Recent technology has made printing high-quality digital photos from your home computer a simple, inexpensive process. Using a basic inkjet printer and the following tips, you can easily transform your amateur shots into professional-looking photo albums, wall art or gifts for your loved ones.

Photo Resolution

Higher resolutions photos will produce better prints. However, resolution cannot be increased once the photo is snapped, so set your camera to the highest resolution possible. You can always reduce the size later. If you plan to print a photo that is less than 5x7 inches, 3 megapixels is sufficient. Larger photos require at least 5 megapixels.

Photo Editing

It is rare to capture a perfect image, so you may need to engage the services of photo editing software to enhance the photo quality. Free programs, such as Windows Live Photo Gallery for Windows 7 or Windows Photo Gallery for Windows Vista, allow you to apply a multitude of effects, including removing red eyes, balancing light and color, softening edges, rotating image orientation and cropping out unwanted elements.

Printer Settings

If you will be regularly printing photos at home, it is crucial that you purchase a quality machine capable of producing high dots per inch (dpi). Look for a printer that offers at least 600 dpi to produce vivid, crisp, finely detailed photos. These settings can be adjusted using your desktop computer or on the printer if it is equipped with a menu screen. High dpi settings will increase the amount of ink used and the time it takes to print the photo, so use the lowest quality settings to run a test print, then switch to the highest quality options when you are ready to run your final print.

Photo Quality Paper

Bright white glossy paper produces a vibrant, shiny image that reflects light well. Purchase paper that has a quick-dry surface and is water resistant to avoid bleeding issues. Matte paper is best for black-and-white or sepia colored prints due to its nonreflective coating. It is also less likely to become smudged from fingerprints and dust. Satin paper offers the best of glossy and matte prints, providing a semi-gloss finish that is still rich in color, yet reflects less light and is fingerprint resistant.

Printer Maintenance

Before printing, run the machine's print cartridge cleaning settings to remove any blockages that may have built up in the ink spray nozzles. You should also be able to adjust the machine's alignment and color calibration.  It's a good idea to have CLEANING SHEETS available to help clear the paper path and keep things from collecting around the inkjets.

If you have questions, we'd be happy to make some suggestions - give us a call at 847-348-3489.

Solving the 'Low Virtual Memory' Message

Has this happened to you? Your computer’s performance gets slower and slower. Applications take a little longer to open each time. Web pages time out before they’ve fully loaded.

Then, something dramatic happens. You get a worrying message that your virtual memory is too low.

It’s not as bad as it seems, however. You can fix the problem of low virtual memory.

Simply put, your computer’s virtual memory is the hard drive space your machine uses when it is running short of random access memory, called RAM. Common programs like Microsoft Office PowerPoint and Microsoft Office Word can be real memory hogs, sometimes using all of your computer’s free RAM.

What can you do about a “virtual memory low” message?

If you get a warning that says your virtual memory minimum is too low or something similar, there are two things you can do to correct the situation.

The simplest solution is to increase the virtual memory size on your hard drive, if space allows. To do that, simply go to your control panel and increase the size in the System section. The exact location varies depending on whether you’re using Windows 7, Windows Vista or another version of the operating system.  Choose the CUSTOM SIZE, and set the MAXIMUM the same as the MINIMUM - 3.5x - 4.5x the amount of Physical RAM is a good rule of thumb.  If you have sufficient disk space available, just set it to 4096 on both.

A somewhat more complicated solution is to add more RAM to your computer. If you continue to get messages that say things like “your computer is running low on virtual memory” even after you increase the virtual memory size on your hard drive, adding more RAM is your only option. That requires opening the case, but the new RAM simply clips into place.

Here are some general guidelines for how much RAM average systems need:

• Windows 7 requires 1 GB of RAM to work properly.
• Windows Vista requires 512 MB of RAM or more to work well, but some applications, especially gaming software, need twice that much.
• Windows XP can manage with only 256 MB of RAM, but like all systems, it will work better with more.

For a work computer, ask your company’s IT administrator to add more RAM for you. It’s a simple process. For your own computer, buy additional RAM at a computer store and ask them to install it for you. You can buy more RAM online if you prefer.  I ususally recommend the following as a good starting point: www.Crucial.com - run the "Scan for Memory" tool and it will tell you what you have and give you options for upgrading.

A low virtual memory message isn’t really as terrible as it sounds. It indicates a problem you can easily solve.