Should I Leave My Laptop Plugged In All The Time?

Should you leave your laptop plugged in and charging when you’re not on-the-go? What’s best for the battery? It’s a tough question, and there are quite a few contradictory recommendations out there.

You Can’t Overcharge the Laptop’s Battery

It’s important to understand the basics of how the standard lithium ion (Li-ion) and Lithium polymer (LiPo) batteries in modern devices work. There are a lot of battery myths out there.

There’s no way to “overcharge” these batteries. When you get to 100% charge and leave your laptop plugged in, the charger will stop charging the battery. The laptop will just run directly off the power cable. After the battery discharges a bit, the charger will kick into gear again and top the battery off. There’s no risk of damaging the battery by charging it over its capacity.

All Batteries Wear Down Over Time (For a Few Reasons)

Your laptop battery will always wear down over time. The more charge cycles you put the battery through, the more it will wear down. Different batteries have different ratings, but you can often expect about 500 full charge cycles.

That doesn’t mean you should avoid discharging the battery. Storing the battery at a high charge level is bad for it. On the other hand, letting the battery run down to completely empty every single time you use it is also bad. There’s no way to just tell your laptop to leave the battery at about 50% full, which might be ideal. On top of that, high temperatures will also wear down the battery more quickly.

In other words, if you were going to leave your laptop battery in a closet somewhere, it would be best to leave it at about 50% charged capacity and make sure the closet was reasonably cool. That would prolong the battery’s life.

Remove the Battery to Avoid Heat, if You Can

Here’s one clear thing: Heat is bad. So, if your laptop has a removable battery, you may want to remove the battery from the laptop if you plan on leaving it plugged in for a long time. This will ensure the battery isn’t exposed to all that unnecessary heat.

This is most important when the laptop runs very hot—like a powerful gaming laptop running demanding PC games, for example. If your laptop runs fairly cool, you won’t see as much benefit from this.

Of course, many modern laptops don’t have removable batteries anymore, so this tip won’t apply in those cases.

But Should I Leave It Plugged In or Not?

Ultimately, it’s not clear which is worse for a battery. Leaving the battery at 100% capacity will decrease its lifespan, but running it through repeated discharge and recharge cycles will also decrease its lifespan. Basically, whatever you do, your battery will wear down and lose capacity. That’s just how batteries work. The real question is what makes it die more slowly.

Laptop manufacturers are all over the place on this. Apple used to advise against leaving MacBooks plugged in all the time, but their battery advice page no longer has this piece of advice on it. Some PC manufacturers say leaving a laptop plugged in all the time is fine, while others recommend against it with no apparent reason.

Apple used to advise charging and discharging the laptop’s battery at least once per month, but no longer does so. If you’re concerned about leaving your laptop plugged in all the time (even if it’s a PC laptop), you might want to put it through a charge cycle once per month just to be safe. Apple used to recommend this to “keep the battery juices flowing”. But whether this will help depends on the device and its battery technology, so there’s really no one-size-fits-all answer.

Occasional Discharge and Recharges Can Help “Calibrate” the Battery

Putting your laptop through an occasional full charge cycle can help calibrate the battery on many laptops. This ensures the laptop knows exactly how much charge it has left and can show you an accurate estimate. In other words, if your battery isn’t calibrated properly, Windows may think you have 20% battery left when it’s really 0%, and your laptop will shut down without giving you much warning.

By allowing the laptop’s battery to (almost) fully discharge and then recharge, the battery circuitry can learn how much power it has left. This isn’t necessary on all devices. In fact, Apple explicitly says it’s no longer necessary for modern MacBooks with built-in batteries.

This calibration process won’t improve the battery’s lifespan or make it hold more energy—it will only ensure the computer is giving you an accurate estimation. But this is one reason you wouldn’t to leave your laptop plugged in all the time. When you unplug it and use it on battery power, it might show you incorrect battery life estimates and die before you expect it to.

Your laptop’s battery isn’t going to last forever, and it will gradually have less capacity over time no matter what you do. All you can do is hope your laptop’s battery lasts until you can replace your laptop with a new one.

Of course, even if the capacity of your laptop’s battery declines, you’ll still be able to keep using it while plugged into a power outlet anyway.

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How Does Wireless Charging Work?

Wireless charging is set to become more popular with the adoption of Qi wireless charging in Apple’s iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X. It’s also found on some Android phones, like Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8, Galaxy S8, and Galaxy S7.

Most wireless chargers use magnetic induction and magnetic resonance. They offer the promise of being able to place a device on a surface and have it charge automatically—no fiddling with cables required.

How Wireless Charging Works

Wireless charging isn’t truly wireless, of course. Your phone, smart watch, tablet, wireless headphones, or other device doesn’t need to be plugged into the charger with a wire, but the wireless charger itself still has to be plugged into a wall outlet to function. When the iPhone 5 was released without the wireless charging feature found in competing Android and Windows phones at the time, Apple’s Phil Schiller argued that “having to create another device you have to plug into the wall is actually, for most situations, more complicated”.

Five years later, Apple has changed its mind. With the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X, Apple is including support for wireless charging using the Qi open standard. (It’s pronounced “chee” as it’s a Chinese word that refers to the “life energy” in living things.)

Wireless chargers typically use magnetic induction. The short explanation is that they use magnetism to transmit energy. First, you place the device–like a smartphone—on the wireless charger. The current coming from the wall power outlet moves through the wire in the wireless charger, creating a magnetic field. The magnetic field creates a current in the coil inside the device sitting on the wireless charger. This magnetic energy is converted to electrical energy, which is used to charge the battery. Devices must have the appropriate hardware in them to support wireless charging—a device without the necessary coil can’t charge wirelessly.

While the Qi standard was originally limited to magnetic induction, it now also supports magnetic resonance. This works similarly, but the device can be up to 45mm away from the wireless charger’s surface rather than touching it directly. This is less efficient than magnetic induction, but there are some advantages—for example, a wireless charger could be mounted under a table’s surface and you could place a device on the table to charge it. It also allows you to place multiple devices on a single charging pad, and have all of them charge at once.

When not actively charging, the Qi charger doesn’t consume the maximum amount of power. Instead, it uses a smaller amount of power and, when it detects a device is placed on the charger, it increases the energy output.

Competing Standards: Qi vs. Powermat vs. Rezence

Wireless charging is becoming more and more common, and even more standardized. And for once, Apple didn’t create its own wireless standard. Instead, it chose to support the existing Qi standard, which many other devices also support.

However, Qi isn’t the only standard around. The Qi standard, which is owned by the Wireless Power Consortium, is ahead, but it’s not alone. In second place is the Power Matters Alliance’s Powermat, or PMA, standard. It uses magnetic induction, like Qi. The two are incompatible, though. An iPhone can’t charge with a PMA wireless charger.

Some devices are compatible with both, however. Modern Samsung devices like the Galaxy Note 8, Galaxy S8, and Galaxy S7 actually support both the Qi and PMA standards, and can charge with either. Starbucks bet on PMA, but they may rethink things now that the iPhone only supports Qi. Apple is betting that airports, hotels, and other public locations will also choose to bet on Qi.

The Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP)’s Rezence uses magnetic resonance instead, a feature Qi added later. This allows for greater freedom of positioning. You can have multiple devices on a single charger, move devices around, and even charge devices through an object like a book between the device and the charger. Rezence requires Bluetooth to communicate with the device.

As the second and third place companies here, the Power Matters Alliance and Alliance for Wireless Power have since rebranded themselves the AirFuel Alliance and are cooperating in an attempt to take on Qi.

How You Can Use Wireless Charging Today

All the technology aside, getting started with wireless charging is pretty simple. If you want to charge your smartphone wirelessly, you’ll need a smartphone that supports wireless charging and a compatible wireless charging mat to place your phone on. You can also purchase adapters to add wireless charging support to phones that don’t include it.

Popular smartphones that support wireless charging include:

l Apple iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X

l Samsung Galaxy Note 8 and Galaxy Note 5

l Samsung Galaxy S8, S8+, S8 Active, S7, S7 Edge, S7 Active

l LG G6 (US and Canada versions only) and LG V30

l Motorola Moto Z, Moto Z Play, Moto Z2 Force, Moto Z2 Play (with wireless charging mod only)

Android manufacturers have increasingly been abandoning wireless charging in recent years. Only Samsung has kept it on its recent high-end phones. For example, Google does not offer wireless charging in its Pixel smartphone, although earlier Nexus phones included this feature. With Apple giving the Qi standard a vote of confidence, wireless charging could become more common on Android devices once again.

If your phone doesn’t support wireless charging, you can add support for wireless charging with a special phone case or wireless charging adapter that you stick on the back of your phone and plug into its power port.

Once you have a phone or adapter that supports wireless charging, pick up a wireless charger that’s compatible with it. For most phones, you’ll want a Qi charger. Any Qi certified wireless charger should work with any Qi certified device. You can find them online on websites like Amazon.com or in electronics stores. Plug the charging pad into the wall and place your phone (or other Qi-enabled device) on it to charge. As long as your device and the charger support the same standard, it will just work.

In the future, wireless chargers will hopefully be more common in public locations, allowing you to just place your smartphone on a table to charge it.

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10 Quick Ways to Speed Up a Slow PC Running Windows 7, 8, or 10

Windows PCs don’t have to slow down over time. Whether your PC has gradually become slower or it suddenly ground to a halt a few minutes ago, there could be quite a few reasons for that slowness.

As with all PC issues, don’t be afraid to give your computer a reboot if something’s not working properly. This can fix quite a few problems and is faster than attempting to manually troubleshoot and fix the problem yourself.

Find Resource-Hungry Programs

Your PC is running slow because something is using up those resources. If it’s suddenly running slower, a runaway process might be using 99% of your CPU resources, for example. Or, an application might be experiencing a memory leak and using a large amount of memory, causing your PC to swap to disk. Alternately, an application might be using the disk a lot, causing other applications to slow down when they need to load data from or save it to the disk.

To find out, open the Task Manager. You can right-click your taskbar and select the “Task Manager” option or press Ctrl+Shift+Escape to open it. On Windows 8, 8.1, and 10, the new Task Manager provides an upgraded interface that color-codes applications using a lot of resources. Click the “CPU,” “Memory,” and “Disk” headers to sort the list by the applications using the most resources. If any application is using too much resources, you might want to close it normally — if you can’t, select it here and click “End Task” to force it to close.

Close System Tray Programs

Many applications tend to run in the system tray, or notification area. These applications often launch at startup and stay running in the background but remain hidden behind the up arrow icon at the bottom-right corner of your screen. Click the up arrow icon near the system tray, right-click any applications you don’t need running in the background, and close them to free up resources.

Disable Startup Programs

Better yet, prevent those applications from launching at startup to save memory and CPU cycles, as well as speed up the login process.

On Windows 8, 8.1, and 10, there’s now a startup manager in the Task Manager you can use to manage your startup programs. Right-click the taskbar and select “Task Manager” or press Ctrl+Shift+Escape to launch it. Click over to the Startup tab and disable startup applications you don’t need. Windows will helpfully tell you which applications slow down your startup process the most.

Reduce Animations

Windows uses quite a few animations, and those animations can make your PC seem a bit slower. For example, Windows can minimize and maximize windows instantly if you disable the associated animations.

To disable animations, press Windows Key + X or right-click the Start button and select “System.” Click “Advanced System Settings” on the left and click the “Settings” button under Performance. Choose “Adjust for best performance” under Visual Effects to disable all the animations, or select “Custom” and disable the individual animations you don’t want to see. For example, uncheck “Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing” to disable the minimize and maximize animations.

Lighten Your Web Browser

There’s a good chance you use your web browser a lot, so your web browser may just be a bit slow. It’s a good idea to use as few browser extensions, or add-ons, as possible — those slow down your web browser and cause it to use more memory.

Go into your web browser’s Extensions or Add-ons manager and remove add-ons you don’t need. You should also consider enabling click-to-play plug-ins. Preventing Flash and other content from loading will prevent unimportant Flash content from using CPU time.

Scan for Malware and Adware

There’s also a chance your computer is slow because malicious software is slowing it down and running in the background. This may not be flat-out malware — it may be software that interferes with your web browsing to track it and add additional advertisements, for example.

To be extra safe, scan your computer with an antivirus program. You should also scan it with Malwarebytes, which catches a lot of “potentially unwanted programs” (PUPs) that most antivirus programs tend to ignore. These programs try to sneak onto your computer when you install other software, and you almost certainly don’t want them.

Free Up Disk Space

If your hard drive is almost completely full, your computer may run noticeably slower. You want to leave your computer some room to work on your hard drive. Follow our guide to freeing up space on your Windows PC to free up room. You don’t need any third-party software — just running the Disk Cleanup tool included in Windows can help quite a bit.

Defragment Your Hard Disk

Defragmenting your hard disk actually shouldn’t be necessary on modern versions of Windows. It’ll automatically defragment mechanical hard drives in the background. Solid-state drives don’t really need traditional defragmentation, although modern versions of Windows will “optimize” them — and that’s fine.

You shouldn’t worry about defragmentation most of the time. However, if you do have a mechanical hard drive and you’ve just put a lot of files on the drive — for example, copying a huge database or gigabytes of PC game files — those files might be defragmented because Windows hasn’t gotten around to defragmenting them yet. In this situation, you might want to open the disk defragmenter tool and perform a scan to see if you need to run a manual defrag program.

Uninstall Programs You Don’t Use

Open the Control Panel, find the list of installed programs, and uninstall programs you don’t use and don’t need from your PC. This can help speed your PC up, as those programs might include background processes, autostart entries, system services, context menu entries, and other things that can slow down your PC. It’ll also save room on your hard drive and improve system security — for example, you definitely shouldn’t have Java installed if you’re not using it.

Reset Your PC / Reinstall Windows

If the other tips here didn’t fix your problem, the one timeless solution to fix Windows problems — aside from rebooting your PC, of course — is getting a fresh Windows installation.

On modern versions of Windows — that is, Windows 8, 8.1, and 10 — it’s easier to get a fresh Windows installation than ever. You don’t have to get Windows installation media and reinstall Windows. Instead, you can simply use the “Reset your PC” feature built into Windows to get a new, fresh Windows system. This is similar to reinstalling Windows and will wipe your installed programs and system settings while keeping your files.

If your PC is still using a mechanical hard drive, upgrading to a solid-state drive — or just ensuring your next PC has an SSD — will offer you a dramatic performance improvement, too. In an age where most people won’t notice faster CPUs and graphics processors, solid-state storage will offer the single biggest boost in overall system performance for most people.

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How to Enable Emergency SOS Services on Your iPhone

In iOS 11, Apple has introduced a new Emergency SOS feature to the iPhone. Let’s look at what it does.

To use Emergency SOS on an iPhone 7 or earlier, press the power button five times quickly. To use it on an iPhone 8, 8 Plus, or X, press and hold both the power button and one of the volume buttons.

Emergency SOS does a couple of things. First, it locks your phone and disables Touch ID and Face ID. To unlock your phone again, you need to enter your password. We’ve talked about this feature before, and it’s a big deal, because under US law, the police can force you to unlock your phone with your fingerprint or face, but they can’t force you to enter your password. This, however, is just one aspect of Emergency SOS.

Emergency SOS also brings up a screen with three swipe bars: one to power off the iPhone, one to access your Medical ID, and one to call the local emergency services; in some areas such as China, you’ll be prompted to select which service you want, for example, whether you want to call the police or an ambulance. Swiping on any of them does exactly what you’d expect.

To configure Emergency SOS, go to Settings > Emergency SOS.

To have your iPhone start calling the emergency services as soon as you trigger Emergency SOS turn on Auto Call. This is on by default on the iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X.

Now, as soon as you trigger Emergency SOS, your iPhone will display a three second countdown and play a loud noise. Once the countdown ends, the iPhone will dial emergency services. You can cancel the call before the countdown ends by tapping Stop and then End Call.

You can also turn the countdown sound off in the Settings menu.

Emergency SOS pulls your Emergency Contact details from your Medical ID in the Health app. To add an Emergency Contact, either head to the Health app yourself or tap Edit Emergency Contacts in Health.

Emergency SOS is a handy feature with a few uses. It makes it easy for you to call the emergency services without knowing the exact number from anyone’s iPhone. It also stops people forcing you to unlock your phone with Touch ID or Face ID.


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What Can You Do With Samsung’s Bixby?

It seems like every technology company under the sun is working on a voice-controlled assistant to go up against the likes of Google’s Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, and Apple’s Siri. Samsung’s branded version gets a boost from the company’s massive smartphone market share and a somewhat less-than-graceful inclusion of an extra hardware button on its latest models. But what all can Bixby do, and how is it different from its erstwhile competitors?

It Can Be Started With a Button (or Your Voice)

Like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, Bixby can work with a voice command—in its case, the rather uninspired “Hi Bixby.” Unlike the others, though, the service also gets a dedicated hardware button on Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S8 and Note 8 phones, putting its functionality front and center. You can expect the feature to trickle down into Samsung’s less expensive models in the coming months, as well as ancillary gadgets like an Echo-style speaker and compatibility with third-party gadgets.

Bixby Integrates With Phone Apps and Hardware

Samsung’s voice control app is designed primarily to access the functions of the phone without having to touch it. In this area, it’s more or less the same as Assistant and Siri, with a couple of notable differences. Voice commands following “Hi Bixby” can activate Samsung apps and third-party apps, and even some of the functions within those apps. For example, “open clock and set alarm for eight AM” is something fairly basic that it can handle easily.

Samsung claims that Bixby’s Voice can perform 15,000 individual voice commands, and its list is growing all the time. It’s integrated will all of the basic apps on Samsung phones, like the dialer, weather, clock, email, and so on, along with more popular third-party apps like the Facebook Android app, Gmail, Instagram, and Twitter. In addition to baked-in commands like “what’s the weather,” Samsung has built a basic “learning” function into Bixby. This lets users train the service to recognize new and generic phrases, like “open Pandora and play my favorite station,” to activate specific functions tailored to their applications. Bixby has deep integration with Samsung’s own apps, too: for example, one of the actions it can perform out of the box is “open camera and turn on ‘Save RAW and JPEG files’ for the rear camera.” Complex stuff.

At the moment, Bixby Voice’s advantages over its competitors are debatable: it seems to be more tightly-integrated to phone hardware than Siri or Assistant, but its ability to control other apps is limited, as is its applications for more general web searches. To put it simply, Bixby lives on your phone, while Google Assistant and Siri live in the cloud.

Bixby Home Is More Annoying Than Useful

The second pillar of the Bixby interface is Bixby Home, a dedicated page on Samsung’s default launcher program. It’s accessible by swiping all the way to the left on the home screen, more or less exactly like Google’s Now Launcher. It can also be launched from any app with a quick tap of the dedicated Bixby hardware button (which can be disabled if you’re prone to accidental touches).

A left swipe isn’t the only thing Bixby Home has in common with Google’s implementation. The service appears to want to be something of an omnibus for the smartphone experience, bringing together functional apps like weather and alarms, integration with Samsung services, breaking news and sports alerts, and quick links to frequently-used apps and shortcuts.

It seems to want to be something of an ethereal home screen alternative, organically bringing up information and applications that you’ll want based on usage context. But unfortunately, it’s less helpful than it would like to be: I’ve found that simply using my preferred launcher and home screen widgets is much more practical in almost every situation. Bixby Home has something of an identity crisis: while the full-page interface for Google Assistant is all about delivering information and Siri is all about accepting commands, Bixby Home wants to do both of those things and launch apps and recommend new activities, on top of more bizarre additions like Samsung shopping rewards and a gamified “experience” system. It is, frankly, a mess. I’ve disabled the button functionality on my phone.

Bixby Vision Has Real Potential

The third portion of Bixby is the most interesting, and holds the most potential. Bixby Vision is a supplement to the stock camera app, activated by pressing the “Bixby Vision” button while shooting. The program uses AI (or so it claims) to almost instantly identify contextual information in the image, bringing up relevant web results with either a general image search or a specific shopping program. It can also analyze photos in your gallery or in Samsung’s Internet browser.

This tool can be useful if you happen to see something that you can’t immediately identify from context—say, a painting in a gallery with no label or caption, or a car that you happened to spot as you’re passing on the bus for which you can’t quite remember the model name. At the moment it mostly relies on results from Pinterest and Amazon.

This stuff is, to put it bluntly, really cool. The problem is that it’s highly contextual: the times when you’d need it aren’t altogether obvious, and it’s not something that would sell phones all on its own, the way Apple’s highly-marketed Siri does. And it’s not alone, either: Google’s Assistant will soon get extra functionality called “Lens” that does basically the same thing.

No Need to Choose

Bixby is in its infancy as a service: right now it’s only supported on three phone models, with only two languages for voice actions (Korean and English), and its integration with third-party apps and services is far behind the likes of Alexa. But Samsung is a giant in its field—in dozens of fields, in fact—and has the money and the muscle to make Bixby a competitor by sheer force of will. We’ll have to wait and see if the company doubles down on Bixby integration in its flagships for years to come, or if it’s just a novelty left by the wayside of tech history.

Fortunately, there’s nothing forcing current users of the Galaxy S8 and Note 8 to choose between Bixby and Google’s more general Assistant. Both of them are built into the Android phones, and though Google is saving some of the juiciest functionality for its Pixel devices, it’s still quite easy to use Assistant’s home button or voice activation functions.

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How to Manage Windows 10’s New “Power Throttling” to Save Battery Life

Windows 10 now performs “Power Throttling” of applications, even traditional Windows desktop programs and background processes. By limiting the CPU available to background applications, Windows 10’s Fall Creators Update can increase battery life on laptops and tablets. You can tell Windows not to perform power throttling for certain processes if this causes a problem.

Why Windows Now Slows Some Programs Down

Modern CPUs have a variety of power states, and can use a low-power mode that is much more energy efficient. When you’re using an application like your web browser, Windows would like to get maximum performance out of your CPU so the application works as fast as possible. However, when applications are just running in the background, Windows would like to put the CPU in its low power state. That background work will still get done, but it will happen a bit slower and the computer will use less power to do the work, increasing your battery life.

To ensure maximum performance for the applications you’re actually using, Microsoft has “built a sophisticated detection system into Windows”. The operating system identifies applications in the foreground, applications playing music, and other categories of important apps, ensuring they won’t be throttled.

If an application doesn’t seem to be important to the user, Windows marks it as available for power throttling. When only these less important processes need to use the CPU, Windows puts it in a low power state. On previous versions of Windows, the operating system wouldn’t be able to transition to that low power state because it treated those background processes the same as foreground processes. Windows now has a way to tell which are important.

This detection process may not always work perfectly, so you can check which applications are marked for Power Throttling and tell Windows they’re important if you don’t want the operating system slowing them down.

This feature is designed to boost battery life on portable PCs, so it’s not used on desktops or on laptops when they’re plugged in. It’s only used when a PC is running on battery power.

How to Check Which Processes Are Power Throttled

Use the Task Manager to check which processes are power throttled on your system. To open it, press Ctrl+Shift+Esc or right-click the taskbar and select “Task Manager”. Click the “Details” tab to view a detailed list of the processes running on your system. If you don’t see the tabs, click the “More details” option first.

In the Details pane, right-click the headings and click “Select Columns”.

Scroll down through the list and enable the “Power Throttling” column. Click “OK” to save your changes.

You’ll now see a Power Throttling column here, which will give you information about each process’s power throttling state. You can drag it around to reposition it, if you like.

If Power Throttling is disabled on your system—for example, if you’re on a desktop PC or laptop that’s plugged in—you’ll just see “Disabled” in this column for every application.

On a portable PC running on battery, you’ll likely see some applications with power throttling “Enabled” and some applications with it “Disabled”.

We saw this in action with Google Chrome. When we had Google Chrome minimized in the background, Windows set Power Throttling to “Enabled” for the chrome.exe processes. When we Alt+Tabbed back to Chrome and it was on our screen, Windows set Power Throttling to “Disabled” for it.

How to Disable Power Throttling System-Wide

To disable power throttling, just plug your portable PC into a power outlet. Power Throttling will always be disabled while the PC is plugged in.

If you can’t plug in right now, you can click the battery icon in the notification area, also known as the system tray. Adjust the power slider to control Power Throttling and other power usage settings.

At “Battery saver” or “Better battery”, Power Throttling will be enabled. At “Better performance”, Power Throttling will be enabled but will be less aggressive. At “Best performance”, Power Throttling will be disabled. Of course, the Best Performance setting will increase power usage and lower your battery life.

How to Disable Power Throttling for an Individual Process

You can also tell Windows to disable Power Throttling for individual processes on your system. This is particularly useful if the auto-detection feature fails and you find Windows throttling important programs, or if a specific background process is important to you and you want it to get maximum CPU resources.

To disable Power Throttling for an application, head to Settings > System > Battery. Click “Battery Usage by App”.

If you don’t see a “Battery” screen here, your PC doesn’t have a battery—which means Power Throttling will never be used.

Select the application you want to adjust here. If an application has “Decided by Windows” underneath it, that means Windows is automatically deciding whether it should be throttled or not.

Uncheck the “Let Windows decide when this app can run in the background” and “Reduce the work app can do when it’s in the background” options here. Power Throttling will now be disabled for that application.

While we’re using Google Chrome as an example here, we don’t recommend disabling Power Throttling for it or any other process unless you have a good reason to do so. This setting will only slow Chrome down when it’s running in the background and will have no effect when you’re actively browsing. The result is improved battery life with no drawback.

In fact, if Power Throttling works properly and never slows something down when you care about it, you should never have to tweak it at all.

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How to Maximize Battery Life on Your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch

So you got yourself a shiny new Apple device, but you’re so addicted that the battery is running out way too soon—what you need is a couple of tips to keep your battery running for as long as possible, and we’ve got them here.

Many of these tips are going to be common sense, and won’t be a surprise to the more geeky readers, but now you’ll have an article you can send to your less geek friends and relatives when they ask you how to improve their battery life.

Keep Your iDevice Out of the Sun

Whatever you do, don’t leave your iPhone or iPod sitting in a hot car—heat kills batteries faster than any other factor, and your device that used to keep a charge for hours will eventually barely hold a charge, and you’ll have to pay Apple to get it replaced. The same thing holds true for any really hot environment: try and store your device in a cool place.

Reduce the Screen Brightness

If you keep the screen at maximum brightness all the time, you’re wasting a lot of battery life—and the screens these days are so bright anyway that you don’t really need to, especially at night. Head into Settings -> Brightness & Wallpaper to adjust the default level of brightness, which you can probably keep as low as 30% most of the time.

Make Sure the Screen Locks Quickly

Even if you’ve adjusted the screen brightness, there’s still no substitute for having it turn off quickly when you’re not using it. Head into General -> Auto-Lock to set the screen lock to happen as quickly as your device will let you. This makes a big difference if you are always picking up your phone and putting it back into your pocket without turning the display off.

Use Airplane Mode When You Don’t Need Internet (iPad/iPhone)

If you’re busy spending the next 8 hours playing Angry Birds, there might not be a good reason to have internet access, so you can consider using Airplane Mode, which turns off both Wi-Fi and the regular wireless radio. Of course, this will prevent phone calls if you’re on an iPhone—but if you’re busy with Angry Birds you probably don’t want the interruption anyway.

Use Wi-Fi Instead of 3G if Possible

According to Apple, the iPad will get 10 hours of battery life under regular use with Wi-Fi enabled, but will only get 9 hours using 3G—the iPhone gets 6 for 3G and 10 for Wi-Fi. Of course, if you’re heavily using the Wi-Fi, you’ll still be draining the battery—the point is under similar workloads, Wi-Fi is better than 3G for battery life.

Reduce or Eliminate Mail & Calendar Checking

If you’ve got a bunch of email, calendar, or contact accounts configured, and they are all being checked and downloading email on a regular basis, you’ll be draining the battery an awful lot faster than you need to.

Reduce or Eliminate Push Notifications

Do you really need notifications from Twitter or whatever other apps you’re running? You can turn these off one-by-one, or turn off Push entirely by heading into Settings -> Notifications, and save a bit of extra battery life since your device won’t be pulling in data for those applications anymore.

Reduce or Eliminate System Sounds

This one is probably a little silly, but if you really don’t care for the system sounds you can save a small amount of battery life by removing the sounds. A very, very small amount, most likely. Head into Settings -> General -> Sounds to change them.

Disable Location Services

If you don’t really need the location services, you can disable them to save some battery life. Head into Settings -> General and flip the Location Services setting to off.

Disable Bluetooth If You Don’t Need It

If you don’t use a Bluetooth headset or keyboard, you should keep the Bluetooth radio disabled to save some extra battery life. Head into Settings -> General -> Bluetooth to flip it on or off.

Disable Vibrate Feature in Games

If you’ve got a game that uses the vibrate feature, you can turn that off to save some battery life. This mostly matters if the game heavily uses it, and you’ll need to change the setting for the game. As a side note, and it should go without saying, if you’re running really intensive video games, they will kill your battery very quickly.

Discharge Your Battery Occasionally

It’s a good idea for your battery to be fully discharged and recharged at least once a month to calibrate the battery life estimate and keep it from dying without warning. You’ll also want to make sure that you don’t store the device with a dead battery, as that can also cause the battery to lose charge capability—when your battery dies, make sure to recharge it quickly.

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Debunking Battery Life Myths for Mobile Phones, Tablets, and Laptops

Batteries need to be cared for properly — they’re a critical part of our mobile devices and battery technology hasn’t advanced as fast as other technologies. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of incorrect information about batteries out there.

Some of the big myths come from old battery technologies and are actively harmful when applied to new battery technologies. For example, nickel-based batteries needed to be fully discharged, while modern lithium batteries shouldn’t be fully discharged.

Perform Shallow Discharges; Avoid Frequent Full Discharges

Old NiMH and NiCd batteries had a “memory effect” and had to be completely discharged from 100% to 0% to keep their capacity. Modern devices use Lithium Ion batteries, which work differently and have no memory effect. In fact, completely discharging a Li-ion battery is bad for it. You should try to perform shallow discharges — discharge the battery to something like 40-70% before recharging it, for example. Try to never let your battery go below 20% except in rare circumstances.

If you were to discharge your battery to 50%, recharge it, and then discharge it to 50% again, that would count as a single “cycle” with modern Li-ion batteries. You don’t need to worry about performing shallow charges.

There’s only one problem that shallow discharges can cause. Laptops can get a bit confused by shallow discharges and may show you wrong estimates for how long your device’s battery will last. Laptop manufacturers recommend you perform a full discharge about once per month to help calibrate the device’s battery time estimate.

Heat (and Cold) Can Damage Batteries

Heat can reduce a battery’s capacity. This affects all types of devices — even smartphones heat up when performing demanding tasks — but laptops can become hottest of all when under load. The battery is in the laptop, near the electronics that become hot while working heavily — this contributes to battery wear.

If you have a laptop that you use plugged in all of the time and it gets quite hot, removing the battery can increase the battery’s life by limiting the battery’s exposure to the heat of your laptop. This won’t make too much of a difference in normal use, but if you’re using a laptop to play a lot of demanding games and it’s heating up quite a bit, it may be helpful. Of course, this only applies to laptops with removable batteries.

Your climate is also a concern. If it gets very hot where you live or you store your device somewhere that gets very hot — say, a hot car left in the sun on a summer day — your battery will wear down faster. Keep your devices near room temperature and avoid storing them in very hot places, such as hot cars on summer days.

Extreme cold temperatures can decrease the lifespan of your battery, too. Don’t put a spare battery in the freezer or expose any device with a battery to similarly cold temperatures if you’re in a region with cold temperatures.

Don’t Leave the Battery At 0%

You shouldn’t leave the battery in a fully discharged state for very long. Ideally, the battery wouldn’t discharge all the way to zero very often — but if it does, you should recharge it as soon as possible. You don’t have to race to a power outlet when your smartphone dies, but don’t throw it in your drawer and leave it there for weeks without charging it. If you let the battery discharge completely and leave your device in a closet, the battery may become incapable of holding a charge at all, dying completely.

Store Batteries at 50% Charge

On the other hand, leaving the battery charged fully for an extended period of time could result in a loss of capacity and shorten its life. Ideally, you’d store the battery at 50% charge if you weren’t going to use it for a while. Apple recommends you leave the battery at 50% if you intend on storing the device more than six months. If you’re using it regularly, you shouldn’t need to worry about its state — although you never want to leave a battery at 0% for too long.

Storing the battery while fully discharged could result in the battery dying completely, while storing the battery at full charge could result in the loss of some battery capacity and shorten your battery’s life.

This applies to both batteries in devices and spare batteries you may have lying around — keep them at 50% if you won’t be using them for some time.

Leaving Your Laptop Plugged in All The Time Is Okay, But…

This one appears to be fairly controversial. We’ve previously covered the eternal question of whether it’s okay to leave your laptop plugged in all the time. We concluded that it’s okay and the battery’s temperature is the main thing you need to worry about. Apple disagrees, recommending against leaving its Macbook Air and Macbook Pro notebooks plugged in all the time.

Ultimately, we’re both saying the same thing. It’s fine to leave your laptop plugged in at your desk when you’re using it, as the laptop won’t “overcharge” the battery — it will stop charging when it reaches capacity. However, just as you shouldn’t store your laptop’s battery at full capacity in a closet, you shouldn’t leave your laptop plugged in for months on end with the battery at full capacity. Allow your laptop’s battery to occasionally discharge somewhat before charging it back up — that will keep the electrons flowing and keep the battery from losing capacity.

Battery University says that “the worst situation is keeping a fully charged battery at elevated temperatures.” If your laptop produces a lot of heat, removing it might be a good idea. If you have a fairly cool laptop that you occasionally let discharge a reasonable amount, leaving it plugged in — even for days on end — shouldn’t be a problem. If your laptop gets extremely hot, you may want to remove the battery, as we mentioned above.

Batteries Will Always Wear Down

Like all other types of batteries, Li-ion batteries will wear down over time, holding less and less charge. Apple says its laptop batteries will reach 80% of their original capacity after “up to” 1000 full discharge cycles. Other manufacturers commonly rate their batteries 300 to 500 cycles.

The batteries can still be used after this point, but they’ll hold less electricity and will power your devices for shorter and shorter periods of time. They’ll continue losing capacity the more you use them. Heat and aging will reduce the battery’s life, too.

Whatever you do, your devices’ batteries will slowly wear down over time. With proper care, you can make them hold a long charge for longer — but there’s no stopping entropy. Hopefully, your device will be due for an upgrade by the time its battery dies.

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The Complete Guide to Improving Android Battery Life

Once upon a time, you had to really keep an eye on your Android phone to make sure the battery wasn’t being depleted prematurely. Manually toggling connections, constantly adjusting brightness, and the like are basically all things of the past now—but there are still things you can do to maximize your handset’s battery life.

Before we get into the how, however, let’s talk about how far Android has come. Back in Android 6.0 Marshmallow, Google released a new feature called Doze Mode, which promised to improve battery life by “forcing” the phone into a deeper sleep when it’s not in use—leave it lying on the table or desk for a bit, and Doze would kick in, saving you precious juice.

Then, with Android Nougat, they improved this even further by making it a bit more aggressive: instead of kicking in while the phone is completely still, Doze now works while the phone is in your pocket, bag, or anywhere else it isn’t in active use. This means fewer apps will take up precious resources on your phone when you aren’t using it, translating to longer battery life.

With Android Oreo, Google implemented a new set of features called “Vitals” that, among other things, aim to intelligently limat background activity in order to save precious battery life.

And so far, it works exceptionally well. There’s just one problem: not everyone has Oreo, Nougat, or in some cases even Marshmallow. If your handset happens to be forever stuck on Lollipop or KitKat (or older), there are still some things that can you do to make sure you’re getting the most life out of the battery.

If you do have one of the newer versions of Android, however, the following will also apply, though to a somewhat lesser extent. We’ll cover some of the newer features—like Android’s built-in Battery Optimizations—further down below.

First: Know Where to Check Your Usage

Look, this may seem like common sense, but I’m going to say it anyway: if you think your battery is draining faster than normal, look at your phone’s battery stats! This is very, very simple: just pull down the notification shade, tap the cog icon (to go to the Settings menu), then scroll down to the Battery section.

One some devices—like most things from the Samsung Galaxy series, for example—this will just show you a basic screen with some estimates. While those are marginally useful, you’ll want to hit the “Battery Usage” button to see the real meat and potatoes here.

On this screen, you can see what’s chewing through your battery, complete with a nice graph and a breakdown by app or service. If there’s an app causing issues, this is where you’ll see it.

But wait, there’s more! What many users may not realize is that if you tap on the aforementioned graph, you’ll get a detailed look at when the device is awake—or “wakelocks” as they’re generally called.

There’s a really simple way to read this screen: the bars show when each particular sub-head is “on.” Since I never disable my phone’s Wi-Fi, the screenshot above shows that Wi-Fi is always on and connected. Same with Cellular network signal. But as you can see, GPS, while always on, isn’t being used.

The “Awake” indicator shows when the phone was allowed to come out of a sleep state—this is what you want to pay close attention to. If this bar is basically solid and “on” all the time, that means something is keeping your device awake all the time, which is bad. You want to see very short bursts on the “Awake” bar while the display is off. (If the screen is on—which you can easily see from its status bar below—then the phone will naturally be awake as well. It’s not going to sleep while it’s being used, after all.)

If you’re seeing something different here, then there’s a problem. And, unfortunately, there’s no easy way to diagnose wakelocks without rooting your phone, which makes it difficult for casual users to diagnose battery issues. (If you do have a rooted phone, you can use an app called Wakelock Detector to pinpoint the problem.)

Lastly, in Oreo, Google brought back the option to “show full devices usage.” That means you can switch between seeing which apps are using the battery, and hardware stats for battery usage. To show this, tap the three-dot overflow menu in the upper right corner, then select “Show full device usage.” To switch back to app view, do the same thing and select “Show app usage.”

By switching back and forth between the two, you’ll be able to better determine what (if anything) is acting out of the ordinary.

In Oreo, Nougat, and Marshmallow: Check Android’s Battery Optimization Settings

In modern versions of Android (which I generally think of as Marshmallow and newer), Android has some built-in battery optimizations. While most of these are enabled by default, it never hurts to check and make sure everything is working as it should.

To access these settings, jump back into the battery menu (Settings > Battery), then tap the three-dot overflow menu in the upper right corner. From there, select “Battery optimization.”

Disable Wireless Connections

Look, I’m not going to pretend that this is going to make a monumental difference in your mobile battery life, but I’m going to say it anyway: disable Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS if you don’t need them.

See, this used to be a very important step in optimizing your Android device’s battery life, but as time has gone on and Google has improved Android, it’s almost unnecessary at this point. Still, if you never use something like Bluetooth, turning it off isn’t going to hurt anything. It’s also worth mentioning that if you do disable Wi-Fi when you’re away from home, don’t forget to turn it back on—you don’t want to chew through your data plan, after all. To toggle Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, pull down the notification shade and tap the appropriate toggle, or jump into Settings and then into each service’s respective entry.

Check Notification Settings

You’ve probably heard that notifications can drain your battery, but as with all things, it’s a bit more complicated than that. These days, the majority of apps use Push Notifications. Instead of constantly monitoring for new notifications (which is very taxing on the battery), push notifications use an always-listening port that’s built into Android to receive information. In other words, instead of the app connecting to the internet every several minutes to see if there’s any new information, Android is always ready to accept new information from services that are enabled on the device. This is far more battery efficient because it’s a passive service.

There are, however, still apps out there that rely on non-push notifications. The biggest offender is generally going to be email services that still rely on POP3—while these are likely few and far between at this point, they’re still out there. A few social networking apps may do something similar.

Use Greenify to Automatically Put Apps into Sleep Mode

While this is admittedly more relevant on pre-Marshmallow devices, it’s still a useful tool to have in your arsenal against terrible battery life. Greenify is an app that essentially pushes apps into a “sleep” state of sorts by using Android’s built-in way of preventing apps from running constantly in the background. It is not a task killer, even though it may sound a bit like one—it’s much more effective.

Keep the Device Out of Extreme Temperatures

This one can be a bit trickier because it’s not just a tweak or toggle—it has to do with where the device physically is. Extreme temperatures—both hot and cold!—can cause the battery to drain much faster.

For example, let’s say you live in a hot climate (like Texas, for example). It’s July and you jump in your car, toss your phone in a dock, and fire up Navigation. That means your GPS is in use, the display is on, and it has the hot sun beating down on it. That’s a recipe for disaster—the device will run hot because it’s working hard, and when you throw that hot sun into the mix it can be catastrophic to your phone’s battery life. In fact, I’ve seen devices lose charge while plugged in under this exact situation. It’s that bad.

Do Not Use Task Killers or Fall for Other Battery Myths

Lastly, it’s important to know what not to do. Lesson number one: don’t use a task killer. I don’t care what anyone says, just don’t. This is a very, very old-school way of thinking that goes back to the day when Blackberries were the hottest things on the planet and mobile operating systems were simply inefficient.

While it may seem like a good idea to stop apps from running, it’s not! A lot of times, they’ll just start right back up, which will actually kill more battery than it saves. Task Killers completely disrupt the way Android is supposed to work, so not only does this not positively impact your battery life, it negatively impacts the system as a whole. Use Greenify instead—it handles background apps much more gracefully.

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Why Can’t I Listen to Radio If My Phone Has an FM Receiver In It?

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai just publicly called on Apple to activate the FM receiver chips found in iPhones for public safety reasons. Many Android phones also contain dormant FM chips. But, if your phone has an FM receiver, why can’t you already listen to the radio on it?

There’s one quick issue with Ajit Pai’s request: As Apple noted, the iPhone 7, iPhone 8, and iPhone X don’t even have an FM chip. But the iPhone 6s and older iPhones do. So why haven’t we been able to listen to the radio on these phones? Could Apple just enable radio functionality with a software update?

Why Is That FM Chip Even There?

Most people probably aren’t aware that older iPhones (and many Android phones) even have FM radio receiver chips in the first place. After all, no iPhone has ever been able to function as an FM radio, although some Android phones have.

So why did Apple choose to add that FM radio hardware in the first place, if Apple doesn’t plan on actually using it? The answer is that Apple didn’t choose to add the FM radio hardware—not really.

Despite Apple’s marketing, which would lead you to believe each part inside the iPhone was designed and manufactured by Apple itself, they aren’t. On an iPhone 6s, the LTE modem for connecting to the cellular network was created by Qualcomm. You can see this if you look at teardowns done by websites like iFixit, which rip apart devices and identify their various components.

Specifically, Apple chose to use the Qualcomm MDM9635M LTE modem for the iPhone 6s. This Qualcomm part comes with FM radio receiving functionality included, as many other Qualcomm modems do. It’s just easier for Qualcomm to include all these features in its hardware and allow device manufacturers to disable them as needed.

Apple didn’t ask for this FM radio receiver hardware and had no plans to use it, so Apple just disables and ignores it. The FM radio receiver may be more commonly activated in developing countries where the ability to listen to radio on a smartphone is in higher demand. You can find it on some Android smartphones in the US, too. But the manufacturer has to choose to enable it.

Why Apple Can’t Enable It Just By “Flipping a Switch”

Apple can’t simply roll out a quick software update that enables the FM radio functionality on the iPhone 6s and older iPhones. We don’t know all the limitations, as Apple is just pointing out that the iPhone 7, iPhone 8, and iPhone X can’t support this in hardware. But, even on an iPhone 6s, Apple would have the following issues to deal with:

The FM chip may not be physically connected in a way that even makes it possible to enable. Only Apple actually knows whether this is true and how difficult it would be to connect.

The underlying chipset firmware would need to be updated.

The FM radio functionality would need testing to ensure it didn’t cause any problems with the iPhone’s cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth reception.

Apple would have to add a Radio app to iOS so users could use the radio.

Enabling the FM radio, even if it were physically possible—and we don’t know if it is—would be a major project for Apple.

But Why Wasn’t It Hooked Up In The First Place?

So iPhones and various Android phones have FM radio hardware just because it’s a standard part of the modem, and they can’t easily enable it after the hardware was released. But that leads to the question: Why wasn’t it enabled in the first place?

This leads us into the realm of speculation, of course. But it’s clear that there are economic incentives for not enabling the FM radio. For Apple, the lack of FM radio functionality pushes iPhone users towards services like Apple Music, Beats 1 Radio, and iTunes. For cellular carriers, the omission of FM radio encourages customers to stream music via the cellular network and use more costly data.

Or, perhaps Apple just didn’t want to put the man-hours into supporting the hardware and software. Let’s be honest: Consumers in the USA haven’t exactly demanded FM radio functionality in their phones. It’s still possible to purchase phones with this feature, and it’s especially common in cheaper Android phones. Samsung’s new Galaxy S8 phones still include an FM radio receiver, but Samsung didn’t even bundle an app that lets you use it. If you download an FM radio receiver app from Google Play, you can listen to FM radio on the latest Galaxy phone. But this isn’t a feature even Samsung thinks is worth mentioning. If this feature was in high demand, it might be more common.

Should FM Chips Be Required and Enabled?

The big argument for enabling FM radio functionality is public safety. FM radio receiving functionality would allow people to receive emergency broadcasts in the case of natural disasters like Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, even when the cellular network goes down.

The National Association of Broadcasters, which represents radio and television broadcasters, has asked manufacturers to enable the radio functionality on their phones. Congress has held hearings on this in the past, too. But former FCC commissioner Tom Wheeler decided not to require smartphone manufacturers to include this feature, a decision even current FCC commissioner Ajit Pai agrees with.

Ultimately, people don’t seem to care much about this feature. Consumers are voting with their dollars. If the FCC commissioner and government want manufacturers to enable FM radio functionality on their phones, they’ll probably have to introduce a law or regulation requiring it.

Of course, it’s also possible that a massive change in public sentiment will lead customers to demand FM radio functionality, which is what the FCC commissioner seems to be hoping for. That just doesn’t seem very likely at the moment.

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Stop Trying to Clean Your Infected Computer! Just Nuke it and Reinstall Windows

Some people spend hours — maybe even days — trying to clean an infected Windows system and ensuring it’s actually clean and safe afterward. It’s usually not a good idea to do this — just reinstall Windows and start over.

This may seem like a daunting task, especially if you don’t have good backups of your important files. But it’s worth it to quickly obliterate an infection and ensure your system is safe.

If One Piece of Malware Slips By, Your Computer is Compromised

The key to securing your computer is ensuring it doesn’t get infected in the first place. That’s why people run antivirus applications that can check programs before they run, ideally preventing a piece of malware from running even once. If malicious software makes it through this protection, it has free rein over your system until it’s discovered and removed.

This is a problem for many different reasons. The malware can take this chance to burrow deeper into your system, hiding itself from being discovered by installing a rootkit that starts up during the boot process. It can infect various system files. It can use its access to transmit your personal data, credit card numbers, and passwords over the Internet.

Worse yet, malware can function as a Trojan horse, opening the floodgates to additional malware that it will download and install from the Internet. If you find your computer is actually infected by a piece of malware, you don’t know if that’s the only piece of malware that’s infected your computer.

Antivirus Utilities Aren’t Perfect, and Can Take Time

Antivirus utilities aren’t perfect. To really clean up a system, you’ll want to run an antivirus boot disc to scan your Windows system for malware and try to remove it all — or at least reboot into safe mode. This scan process takes some time, and it isn’t guaranteed to be 100 percent successful. If your system is infected and the anti-malware software found and removed an infection — or, even more worryingly, multiple infections — there’s no guarantee your system is completely safe.

To mitigate this problem, you might want to run multiple different antivirus programs, scanning your system with those multiple engines to get a second, third, and maybe even fourth opinions. This takes more and more time, and you’ll never be 100 percent sure everything is gone, and your system is completely secure.

Fix Any Infection By Reinstalling Windows

Reinstalling Windows is the solution. If a computer is seriously infected — not just by a shady Ask toolbar or the browser cookies many silly security programs consider a “threat,” but by actual malware — we recommend starting over from a fresh Windows system. To do this, you just need to use your manufacturers’ recovery partition to restore your Windows system, reinstall Windows from disc or USB drive, or use the Refresh your PC feature found in Windows 8 or 10.

When you reinstall Windows, your system files will be wiped and they’ll be replaced with known-good ones from the Windows installation disc. You’ll also have to install your programs again, which will ensure they’re safe, too. This takes a bit of time, but perhaps not as much as you’d think — especially if you have good backups. It can also save time over long, arduous slog of cleaning an infected PC and triple-checking it.

Ensure you have backups of your important files before doing this! Some methods of reinstalling Windows won’t wipe your personal files, but it’s always good to be safe.

How to Quickly Back Up Your Important Files

If you keep good backups, you’re good to go. If not, you’ll want to back up your important files first. You probably shouldn’t do this while the infected system is running. Instead, we recommend booting from a Linux live CD or USB drive and using that clean system to copy your important data files to a USB drive. Believe it or not, you can also back up your files directly from a Windows installer disc if you have one lying around!

You’ll then have a backup, and you can copy the files from your backup to your fresh Windows system after reinstalling Windows.

Ensure Your Backups Are Secure

You’ll want to ensure all your backups are clean and uninfected, of course. Generally, the files to watch out for are the .exe files and other executable programs. These can be infected by viruses and infect your system later. Microsoft Office files could also potentially have malicious macros inserted into them, but modern versions of Office are more resistant to this. Other data files like images, videos, and music generally can’t be infected.

It’s a good idea to eye and .exe files with suspicion if they came from an infected computer. Re-download them if possible to ensure they’re safe. You’ll also want to run a scan of your backup files with an anti-malware program after getting a fresh system, ensuring nothing nasty is hiding in your backups somewhere.

This may sound like a Herculean task for people who don’t keep good backups and are worried about setting up their computers from scratch. But, if you do anything sensitive with your computer, from online banking and shopping to filing taxes with your social security number, it’s better to be safe than sorry. You won’t be worrying whether your computer is still infected in a week or two.

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How to Increase Your Windows Laptop’s Battery Life

We often fixate on smartphone battery life, but most laptops still don’t have all-day battery life. Rather than always using your laptop tethered to an outlet, here are some ways to squeeze more life from your laptop’s battery.

None of these tricks will turn a laptop without much stamina into an all-day workhorse, but they’ll help you go without an outlet for a while longer. Pay particular attention to your laptop’s display — that’s the big battery sucker.

Reduce Screen Brightness

The biggest battery drain on any modern portable electronic device — whether it’s a laptop, smartphone, or tablet — is the display. Reducing your screen’s brightness is a simple way to squeeze significantly more time from your laptop’s battery.

On a typical laptop, you generally hold the Function (Fn) key and press the brightness buttons on your laptop keyboard. The lower the brightness level, the longer you can use your laptop on battery power.

You can also use the Windows Mobility Center to quickly adjust screen brightness. Open it by pressing Windows Key + X on Windows 7. On Windows 8, you can launch it from the Control Panel — Windows Key + X opens the power user menu instead.

Have Your Display Automatically Turn Off

If you step away from your laptop for a few minutes, its screen will still be on, draining power. You can set more aggressive display power settings to have the laptop dim and turn off the display when you’re not using it.

Open the Power Options dialog in the Control Panel and set your display to dim and turn off after a short period of time. You can move your mouse or press any key to turn the display right back on with no delay, so this is an easy way to save power — as long as the display doesn’t turn off while you’re using the laptop, this shouldn’t bother you too much. Media players set the display to automatically stay on while they’re running, ensuring you can still watch a video without constantly having to move your mouse or change your power settings.

Disable Bluetooth and Other Hardware Devices

Your laptop likely has a Bluetooth radio and may even have an infrared (IR) port. All of these devices use battery power simply by being enabled and powered on. You can save battery power by disabling them when you aren’t using them. To disable Bluetooth, you can often press the Function (Fn) key and press the key with the Bluetooth symbol on your laptop.

Disabling Wi-Fi can also help if you aren’t using it. For example, if you’re using your laptop on an airplane and not taking advantage of in-flight Wi-Fi, turn off your laptop’s Wi-Fi to save some power. Wi-Fi can be turned off in a similar way using the function keys on your laptop or even by disabling the Wi-Fi adapter in the Control Panel’s network connections window.

Tweak Your Power Plan

Windows offers power plans that can quickly change your laptop’s power settings to different profiles. For example, you can have your computer in Balanced mode most of the time and switch to Power saver mode when you need every bit of power you can get. Each power plan’s settings can be modified individually. You’ll find power plans in the Control Panel’s Power Options window.

To modify advanced power options, click the Change plan settings link and select Change advanced power settings.

You can change a variety of settings here, including setting your laptop to power off its hard drive more quickly and telling your computer to slow down the processor rather than turning on the fan if it becomes hot. Both of these behaviors will save power. The default settings should be fairly optimal if you select Power saver mode, but you can make the settings even more aggressive in some areas.

Use the Windows Power Troubleshooter

Windows 7 and 8 include a power troubleshooting tool that will scan your system for common battery drains and automatically fix them. To load this tool, open the Troubleshooting pane in the Control Panel — perform a search for Troubleshooting to find it.

Select the View All option in the Troubleshooting pane and launch the Power troubleshooter.

Windows will look for common issues and automatically fix them. This is a quick way to check if a laptop’s settings are optimal without digging through many different options dialogs.

Slim Down Startup Programs, Use Lighter Software

To save power, make your computer do less in general:

l Don’t use a screensaver. They’re unnecessary on modern displays and will drain your battery to do nothing useful when your display could be off and saving power.

l Run fewer programs in the background. Examine your system tray for programs you don’t need and uninstall them or disable them and prevent them from automatically starting with your computer.

l Reduce CPU usage. If you use heavy programs that have your CPU doing a lot of work all of the time, your CPU will use more power and your battery will drain faster. Running fewer programs in the background can help with this, as can selecting lightweight programs that are easy on system resources.

l Avoid maxing out your RAM. If your computer fills its RAM and needs more memory, it will move data to the page file on its hard drive, and this extra hard drive usage can drain battery. This shouldn’t be a problem on modern computers with a decent amount of RAM. If your laptop’s RAM is full, try to make more RAM available — close programs running in the background or even upgrade your laptop’s RAM.

The less your computer has to do, the more power it can save. You can find more information about CPU and RAM usage in your Task Manager.

Hibernate Instead of Sleep

When your laptop goes to sleep, it uses a small amount of power to power its RAM and keep its system state loaded in memory, allowing it to wake up and resume in just a few seconds. When your laptop hibernates, it saves its system state to disk and powers off, using almost no power.

If you’re not going to be using your laptop for a few hours, place it into hibernate mode rather than sleep mode to conserve even more battery power. Sleep mode doesn’t use a lot of battery power, but hibernate uses as much as having the computer powered off.

If you’ve had your laptop for a while and the battery is holding less power than it used to — but you’re not ready to upgrade to a new laptop just yet — you can try replacing your laptop’s battery with a new one for even longer battery life.

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Why Android Phones Slow Down Over Time and How to Speed Them Up

Do Android phones and tablets slow down over time? Many people seem to think so. We’ll look at the reasons why devices slow down and how to battle slow downs.

This problem isn’t necessarily unique to Android — try using an iPad 3 with iOS 7 and feel how slow it’s become — but it does seem to be reported by many Android users.

Operating System Updates and Heavier Apps

Your Android phone doesn’t have the same software it had a year ago. If you’ve received Android operating system updates, they may not be as nicely optimized for your device and may have slowed it down. Or, your carrier or manufacturer may have added additional bloatware apps in an update, which run in the background and slow things down.

Even if you haven’t seen a single update, the apps running on your device are newer. Whether you’re using newer apps or updated versions of the same apps you were using a year ago, apps seem to become heavier over time. As developers gain access to faster smartphone hardware, games and other apps may be optimized for this faster hardware and perform worse on older devices. This seems to happen on every platform. As the years go by, websites become heavier, desktop applications want more RAM, and PC games become more demanding.

How to Fix It: There’s not much you can do here. If your operating system seems slow, you may want to install a custom ROM like CyanogenMod that doesn’t have the bloatware and slow manufacturer skins many devices include. If your apps seem slow, try hunting for more lightweight apps.

Background Processes

You’ve probably installed more apps as you continue to use your device. Some apps open at startup and run in the background, consuming CPU resources and taking up your device’s memory. If you’ve installed a lot of apps that run in the background, they can slow down your device. Android offers real multitasking, so apps can run in the background.

If you’re using an animated live wallpaper and have a large amount of widgets on your home screen, these will take up CPU, graphics, and memory resources. Slim your home screen down and you’ll see an improvement.

Apps running in the background can also consume resources. To check what apps are using background processes, visit the Apps screen in the Settings app and swipe over to the Running category. If you don’t use an app that’s running in the background, uninstall it. If you can’t uninstall it because it came with your device, disable it. Don’t just end the service — it will automatically restart.

How to Fix It: Disable live wallpapers, remove widgets, and uninstall or disable heavy apps you don’t use. In fact, you may want to uninstall all the apps you never use.

A Nearly Full File System

Solid-state drives slow down as you fill them up, so writing to the file system may be very slow if it’s almost full. This will cause Android and apps to appear to be much slower. The Storage screen in the Settings app will show you how full your device’s storage is and what’s using the space.

Cache files can consume quite a bit of storage space if allowed to grow unchecked, so clearing cache files can free up disk space and make your file system perform better. To clear cached data for all installed apps at once, open the Settings app, tap Storage, scroll down, tap Cached data, and tap OK.

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How to Fix It: Uninstall apps you don’t use, delete files you don’t need, and clear app caches to free up space. You can also just perform a factory reset and only install the apps you need to end up with a like-new device.

No Solid-State Drive TRIM

The lack of proper TRIM support was the main thing that caused Google’s original Nexus 7 tablet to slow down over time. This was fixed in Android 4.3, which added proper TRIM support. On Nexus devices, updating to Android 4.3 will fix this problem.

If you have an older device that doesn’t have Android 4.3 and has slowed down over time, you can perform TRIM by rooting it and using the LagFix app. This app runs the same fstrim command Android 4.3 runs in the background. TRIM is necessary because of how solid-state drives work — solid-state drives slow down over time because flash memory cells must be cleared before they can be written to again. TRIM preemptively clears cells that contain data from deleted files, ensuring things will be as fast as possible when Android needs to write to those cells in the future.

How to Fix It: Root your device and run LagFix if you’re using an older device. This happens automatically on devices running Android version 4.3 and newer.

Performing a factory reset and installing only the apps you use will help by removing all those old apps and files in one fell swoop. A factory reset won’t fix bloatware included with your device or run TRIM on your device’s storage, but it can help — just like reinstalling Windows can help fix a slow PC.

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How to Enable Wi-Fi Calling on an Android Phone

If you’re on a carrier that supports it, Wi-Fi calling is a great feature to have. It will allow your smartphone to use the best connection in your house to make and receive calls and text messages. It also allows for higher quality audio, and it’s perfect if you don’t get good signal in your house.

While this has been a feature found on Android for many years, it’s still shocking how many people don’t know it exists. This is in part due to slow carrier adoption, but also just a general lack of coverage for the feature and its usefulness. T-Mobile is probably the biggest proponent of Wi-Fi calling at this point, though the four major carriers—Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon—all support the feature. Unfortunately, if you’re saving money by using an MVNO, you likely won’t have it as an option. That’s a bummer.

Most modern Android phones should support Wi-Fi calling, but it can be hit and miss. For example, while the Galaxy S7 generally offers support for Wi-Fi calling, my international version of the phone doesn’t offer the feature. Basically, it has to be supported by both the phone and the carrier.

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Ergo, if you go digging around and try to find the setting we’re going to talk about below and it’s not there, either your carrier doesn’t offer it, or it’s not available on your particular phone.

How to Enable Android’s Native Wi-Fi Calling

Even if you’re using a phone and carrier combo that supports Wi-Fi Calling, it’s probably not enabled by default. To turn it on, you’ll need to jump into the Settings menu. I’m using a Google Pixel running Android 8.0 (Oreo) here, so the process may vary slightly on your phone.

While you can go through all the steps to tap your way into the Wi-Fi Calling menu (which you’ll find instructions for in the “Just the Steps” box to the right), the easiest thing to do is just search for it. Pull down the notification shade and tap the gear icon to get started.

From there, tap the magnifying glass, then type “wifi calling.” If it’s available in your situation, it should show up here.

In my scenario, Android didn’t throw me directly into the Wi-FI Calling menu, but rather into the advanced section of Wi-Fi settings, where Wi-Fi Calling is found. Go ahead and tap the Wi-Fi Calling option to jump into its section of the menu.

Boom, there you go—slide the toggle to turn it. You can also select whether you want the phone to prefer WI-Fi networks or mobile networks for calls. Whenever it has both, it will use your preferred option, then seamlessly switch to the other when one becomes unavailable.

No Native Wi-Fi Calling? No Problem—Just Use an App

Just because your carrier and/or phone doesn’t technically support Wi-Fi Calling natively doesn’t mean you can’t use another form of the feature if you’d like. There are plenty of apps out there that will let you make calls, here are a few of the most popular ones:

Ÿ Facebook Messenger

Ÿ Google Hangouts (you’ll need the Hangouts Dialer app)

Ÿ Google Voice

Ÿ Google Duo

Ÿ Skype (Note: Costs money)

Basically, any of those apps will let you make calls over Wi-Fi, but they won’t use your actual phone number, nor will they call out to a traditional phone in most cases. Instead, you’ll actually place calls from account to account; for example, if you use Facebook Messenger, you actually just “call” the person on their Facebook account instead of putting in a phone number. The same goes for free Skype accounts, though you can pay money to call normal phone numbers.

Google Hangouts and Voice are other exceptions—they essentially work together to make calls. You’ll need a Google Voice number, as well as the Hangouts Dialer to make calls, in which case you should be able to call out to any traditional phone number. The problem will come when you want to receive calls using these tools—you’ll have to do quite a bit of extra setup for that.

Truth be told, Facebook Messenger is probably the best way to go, assuming the person you’re trying to chat is also on Facebook (and your friends list). It’s very easy to use and offers good call quality.

It’s also worth noting that these services will also work with mobile data, so you don’t have to be on Wi-Fi to use them. That’s cool.

Wi-FI Calling is a very cool service, and it’s definitely something you should enable if your carrier and phone support it. You’ll get higher quality calls and essentially no “dead zones” where calls will fall off or mute.

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The Complete Guide to Improving Android Battery Life

Once upon a time, you had to really keep an eye on your Android phone to make sure the battery wasn’t being depleted prematurely. Manually toggling connections, constantly adjusting brightness, and the like are basically all things of the past now—but there are still things you can do to maximize your handset’s battery life.

Before we get into the how, however, let’s talk about how far Android has come. Back in Android 6.0 Marshmallow, Google released a new feature called Doze Mode, which promised to improve battery life by “forcing” the phone into a deeper sleep when it’s not in use—leave it lying on the table or desk for a bit, and Doze would kick in, saving you precious juice.

Then, with Android Nougat, they improved this even further by making it a bit more aggressive: instead of kicking in while the phone is completely still, Doze now works while the phone is in your pocket, bag, or anywhere else it isn’t in active use. This means fewer apps will take up precious resources on your phone when you aren’t using it, translating to longer battery life.

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With Android Oreo, Google implemented a new set of features called “Vitals” that, among other things, aim to intelligently limat background activity in order to save precious battery life.

And so far, it works exceptionally well. There’s just one problem: not everyone has Oreo, Nougat, or in some cases even Marshmallow. If your handset happens to be forever stuck on Lollipop or KitKat (or older), there are still some things that can you do to make sure you’re getting the most life out of the battery.

If you do have one of the newer versions of Android, however, the following will also apply, though to a somewhat lesser extent. We’ll cover some of the newer features—like Android’s built-in Battery Optimizations—further down below.

First: Know Where to Check Your Usage

Look, this may seem like common sense, but I’m going to say it anyway: if you think your battery is draining faster than normal, look at your phone’s battery stats! This is very, very simple: just pull down the notification shade, tap the cog icon (to go to the Settings menu), then scroll down to the Battery section.

One some devices—like most things from the Samsung Galaxy series, for example—this will just show you a basic screen with some estimates. While those are marginally useful, you’ll want to hit the “Battery Usage” button to see the real meat and potatoes here.

On this screen, you can see what’s chewing through your battery, complete with a nice graph and a breakdown by app or service. If there’s an app causing issues, this is where you’ll see it.

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But wait, there’s more! What many users may not realize is that if you tap on the aforementioned graph, you’ll get a detailed look at when the device is awake—or “wakelocks” as they’re generally called.

There’s a really simple way to read this screen: the bars show when each particular sub-head is “on.” Since I never disable my phone’s Wi-Fi, the screenshot above shows that Wi-Fi is always on and connected. Same with Cellular network signal. But as you can see, GPS, while always on, isn’t being used.

The “Awake” indicator shows when the phone was allowed to come out of a sleep state—this is what you want to pay close attention to. If this bar is basically solid and “on” all the time, that means something is keeping your device awake all the time, which is bad. You want to see very short bursts on the “Awake” bar while the display is off. (If the screen is on—which you can easily see from its status bar below—then the phone will naturally be awake as well. It’s not going to sleep while it’s being used, after all.)

If you’re seeing something different here, then there’s a problem. And, unfortunately, there’s no easy way to diagnose wakelocks without rooting your phone, which makes it difficult for casual users to diagnose battery issues.

Lastly, in Oreo, Google brought back the option to “show full devices usage.” That means you can switch between seeing which apps are using the battery, and hardware stats for battery usage. To show this, tap the three-dot overflow menu in the upper right corner, then select “Show full device usage.” To switch back to app view, do the same thing and select “Show app usage.”

By switching back and forth between the two, you’ll be able to better determine what (if anything) is acting out of the ordinary.

In Oreo, Nougat, and Marshmallow: Check Android’s Battery Optimization Settings

In modern versions of Android (which I generally think of as Marshmallow and newer), Android has some built-in battery optimizations. While most of these are enabled by default, it never hurts to check and make sure everything is working as it should.

To access these settings, jump back into the battery menu (Settings > Battery), then tap the three-dot overflow menu in the upper right corner. From there, select “Battery optimization.”

By default, this will show apps that aren’t optimized out of the gate. Some of these won’t be able to be optimized, which is why they’re not optimized in the first place. Others may have the option available but may be disable for practical purposes—like Android Wear in my case here. Optimizations for that particular apps are disabled so the watch will always stay connected to my phone.

If you want to see a list of all apps (both optimized and unoptimized), just tap the dropdown and choose “All apps.”

I recommend just looking through this list and seeing if there’s anything that can be tweaked. Maybe there won’t be, but it never hurts to look.

Disable Wireless Connections

Look, I’m not going to pretend that this is going to make a monumental difference in your mobile battery life, but I’m going to say it anyway: disable Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS if you don’t need them.

See, this used to be a very important step in optimizing your Android device’s battery life, but as time has gone on and Google has improved Android, it’s almost unnecessary at this point. Still, if you never use something like Bluetooth, turning it off isn’t going to hurt anything. It’s also worth mentioning that if you do disable Wi-Fi when you’re away from home, don’t forget to turn it back on—you don’t want to chew through your data plan, after all. To toggle Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, pull down the notification shade and tap the appropriate toggle, or jump into Settings and then into each service’s respective entry.

With GPS, things aren’t as cut and dry and “on” and “off.” Back in the day, this was a monstrous battery hog, so Google optimized the absolute snot out of it—nowadays, it’s pretty much only used when it absolutely has to be, and only for as long as it needs to be. For example, your weather apps may briefly check for current location when you open the app so it can provide the most accurate forecast. If you’re using Navigation, on the other hand, GPS will stay on the entire time, because, you know…directions.

All that said, you can still actually control how GPS works. For example, you can allow the phone to use “High Accuracy” mode, which will find your location using a combination of GPS, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi/cellular networks. This uses the most battery, but it’s also the most accurate.

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So, if you head into Settings > Location, you can control this. Just tap on the “Mode” entry to see the available options. Remember, the less battery it uses, the less accurate it is! If you don’t use GPS or location services very often, go ahead and try one of the less-accurate and more battery-efficient modes. If you notice anything funky after that, then you may have been using an app that relies on a more accurate location service, so you’ll either have to deal with some jankiness or revert back to a higher accuracy mode.

Check Notification Settings

You’ve probably heard that notifications can drain your battery, but as with all things, it’s a bit more complicated than that. These days, the majority of apps use Push Notifications. Instead of constantly monitoring for new notifications (which is very taxing on the battery), push notifications use an always-listening port that’s built into Android to receive information. In other words, instead of the app connecting to the internet every several minutes to see if there’s any new information, Android is always ready to accept new information from services that are enabled on the device. This is far more battery efficient because it’s a passive service.

There are, however, still apps out there that rely on non-push notifications. The biggest offender is generally going to be email services that still rely on POP3—while these are likely few and far between at this point, they’re still out there. A few social networking apps may do something similar.

The easiest way to tell if this is the case with an app is to check its notification options: if you have to specify a “refresh” or “update” interval, the app or service isn’t using push notifications, and you’re probably best off turning off notifications for that app entirely. Your battery will thank you.

Use Greenify to Automatically Put Apps into Sleep Mode

While this is admittedly more relevant on pre-Marshmallow devices, it’s still a useful tool to have in your arsenal against terrible battery life. Greenify is an app that essentially pushes apps into a “sleep” state of sorts by using Android’s built-in way of preventing apps from running constantly in the background. It is not a task killer, even though it may sound a bit like one—it’s much more effective.

To set up Greenify, first install the app from Google Play—if you’d like to support the developer’s work, then you can also opt for the $2.99 “Donation Package.” It’s worth mentioning that Greenify is more useful on rooted handsets, but it can also be used on non-rooted phones—the difference is that everything is automated on a rooted device, where you’ll have to “manually” greenify apps on non-rooted devices.

Once it’s installed, go ahead and fire up the app. If your handset is rooted, you’ll grant it superuser access here; if not, well, you won’t.

You can add apps to be greenified (aka put to sleep) by tapping the plus sign in the top-right corner. Greenify will show you apps that are currently running, along with apps that may slow your device down under certain circumstances. Go ahead and tap all the items you’d like to greenfiy, but keep in mind that the apps will no longer sync in the background after being greenified! For example, if you greenify your messaging apps, you’ll stop receiving text messages. Or, if you greenify your alarm clock, it won’t go off. Be thoughtful in what you choose to add to this list!

Keep the Device Out of Extreme Temperatures

This one can be a bit trickier because it’s not just a tweak or toggle—it has to do with where the device physically is. Extreme temperatures—both hot and cold!—can cause the battery to drain much faster.

For example, let’s say you live in a hot climate (like Texas, for example). It’s July and you jump in your car, toss your phone in a dock, and fire up Navigation. That means your GPS is in use, the display is on, and it has the hot sun beating down on it. That’s a recipe for disaster—the device will run hot because it’s working hard, and when you throw that hot sun into the mix it can be catastrophic to your phone’s battery life. In fact, I’ve seen devices lose charge while plugged in under this exact situation. It’s that bad.

What many people may not realize, however, is that extreme cold is just as bad as heat. The safe operating temperatures for lithium ion batteries is –4°F to 140°F—circumstances that are highly unlikely for most people to be in—while the safe charging temperatures are much lower: 32°F to 113°F. Naturally, as you get close to either end of this extreme, battery life will be negatively affected.

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