5 Easy Ways to Prolong Laptop Life

Taking good care of your laptop is the number one factor to prolong your laptop life. Rather than giving you hundreds of methods, I will summarize it into 5 simple and practical ways.

Use laptop bag to store your laptop

Using laptop bad is quite a necessity especially for frequent traveler. Laptop bag has cushion and padding to help absorb shock and scratch from outside. With a good quality laptop bag, it is made from water proof material that will help protect your laptop in case you are caught in rain. In worst case serious, if you accidentally drop your laptop, a laptop bag will reduce the impact of the drop and protect the laptop from breaking.

Use laptop on flat hard surface

Laptop is a very compact computer where there is minimum space inside the chassis to release heat. Most of the time, heated air is ventilated out from the side and bottom of the laptop. By placing laptop on top of flat hard surface, heated air travel more easily out from the bottom of the laptop. Some of us like to work from bed, which is actually a bad idea. Bed cover is usually made from wool and cotton base material, which caused the heated air to be trapped under the laptop and cause serious overheating.

Switch OFF laptop if not in use

Unlike PC, laptop does not built to run for extended period of time. With PC, we can leave the machine running for weeks for downloading your videos, but laptop is different case. Overheating is the biggest problem in all laptops. Therefore, whenever the laptop is not in use, switch it off. Another alternative is to enforce laptop power scheme. Let’s say after X period of inactivity, the laptop will switch off the hard disk. After X+Y period of inactivity, the laptop will go into standby/hibernate mode.

Use laptop cooler

Laptop cooler is a flat device, with ventilation fan inside the device to help cool down the laptop. Laptop cooler is place directly under the laptop and powered by the USB port. The laptop cooler is an inexpensive device and a good solution to help solve the overheating problem. Another advantage is that laptop cooler can be used to create flat hard surface for your laptop, in case you are working on soft surface like bed.

No food and drink near the laptop

Refrain from eating or drinking near the laptop. The crumbs from the food can slip through the keyboard directly to the components inside the laptop. A dirty laptop will attract bugs to build nest inside your laptop. As for spilled drink, it can cause serious damage to all your components inside the laptop. This is because liquid can short-circuit on the motherboard, hard disk and processor. As a result, you may experience loss of data and permanent failure to your major components.

There you go, 5 simple and practical ways to protect and prolong your laptop. Not to mention a cool laptop will run faster than a hot laptop.