Busting 5 Leading Battery Life Myths of Laptops and Mobile Devices

Battery life of computing devices and smartphones has always been a huge concern among users. We do adopt different types of tips and tricks to keep the battery of our devices intact. In light of this different myths have also surfaced. Check out which of these myths are true and let’s bust out the other false myths.

1st Myth: If you set your display to automatically change its brightness then you can save battery life.

Modern day laptop and mobile devices have light sensors that can detect the intensity of light falling on the device and automatically adjust the brightness of the display screen. Now, there is the myth that if you set your device to automatically change its brightness according to the light conditions, then you can save battery life, because your screen will not remain unnecessarily bright during situations when it can be dimmer. However, the fact lies miles away of this notion. This feature will rather make your device consume more battery as each time the brightness of your environment will change, the light sensors of the device will bug the CPU of your laptop to do the necessary changes in the brightness of the display screen. In this way, you will make the CPU of your device to perform extra job and hence more battery will be consumed.

2nd Myth: If you are using live wallpapers on laptops or smartphones, then your device will consume more battery.

Live wallpapers are the wallpapers with some kind of animation or movement in them. Now there is the buzz around that use of live wallpapers will drain more battery. The impact of this buzz is so much that many users prefer not to have live wallpapers just to save battery power. The truth is live wallpapers do decrease your battery life as it put the CPU and GPU of your device into work. But the interesting fact is that the battery power drainage because of live wallpapers is even less than 2%. Means it is so insignificant that you don’t even need to think whether to have live wallpaper or not, at least not out of battery concern.

3rd Myth: If you change the setting of auto-updating apps to "manual" then you can increase the battery life of your device.

The auto-updating apps like Twitter and Facebook do polling for auto-updating. Through polling only they provide you updated tweets, new e-mail, weather updates, etc. To do this polling, these contact their servers and pull the updates to your phone using Wi-Fi or 3G. At the time of polling, these apps use Wi-Fi/3G, so they definitely suck a good amount of battery. If you allow polling in your device on a regular basis, then you will notice significant battery drainage as the automated-apps will continue using the Wi-Fi/3G irrespective of the fact that you are actually using these apps or not. Hence, by changing the setting of auto-updating apps to "manual" you can save battery as the Wi-Fi/3G will get used only when you are actually using the app. So, this is not a myth but an established truth.

4th Myth: Using a task killer, if you kill those apps that you are not using actively, then you can improve the battery life of your smartphone

On this myth you will get two schools of thought, one confirms the myth while other has busted the myth. Then, who do you believe? Task killers are the programs that perform the job of Task Manager for Windows. So, these programs are expected to kill those apps in your smartphones that you are not using any more in order to free up RAM.

Because presence of unused programs will consume space and also lead to battery drainage. So, it seems task killer is important to increase the battery life of your smartphone. But the fact is Android handles this differently. Android is designed to automatically kill a task that you are not using for a long. Also, when there is need of space, then Android will automatically kill the used tasks. Hence, Android smartphones don’t need task killers. Therefore, task killers can do nothing to increase the battery life of your device.

5th Myth: Every time you use your laptop, you should fully discharge your battery in order to prolong its life span.

This is a complete myth that is left over from the fact that earlier used old nickel cadmium batteries required to be handled in this way as they suffered from memory effect. But the modern lithium batteries need less maintenance and don’t have such limitations like getting fully discharged or charged.

Now, as you have the real idea of popular myths about battery life of laptops and mobile ideas, you can judge what to do and what not to do for the battery life enhancement of your devices.

About the Author: Hi! I am Brook M. Perry, a prolific blog writer and keen author of articles related to online laptop support and solution for issues related to computers and mobile devices. Being associated with the reputed best pc tuneup service provider Qresolve, I have resolved thousands of tech issues for our customers from worldwide. android tablet support My areas of interest are PC security, endpoint security system, router support etc. You can follow me for my useful remote computer support articles on Ezine and other article-oriented websites.

Brooke M. Perry is an ardent technician associated with Qresolve computer security, with wide experience of fixing issues with PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphones.