In the last two parts of this series, I covered the factors of temperature and charging. While the high temperatures inside modern laptops are probably the worst enemy of a Li-ion battery, frequent discharge/charge cycles will negatively influence a battery’s life. If your laptop is a desktop replacement, then you probably only need the battery every now and then. It can be quite frustrating if you want to use your laptop for the first time after a year without AC, only to realize that your batteries are already dead even though you never really used them. However, if you remove the battery from the laptop and store it accurately, there is a good chance that it will be in good condition when you need it next time.

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A laptop battery can be charged 300-1000 times. The actual number depends on the way it has been treated. In the last post of this series, I outlined the influence that the temperature has on a battery’s lifespan. Today, I will explain how a battery should be charged and discharged with care.

Fully discharge a new battery and then re-charge it. This calibrates the battery.

Calibrate the battery every 30 charges, i.e., fully discharge it and charge afterwards.

Avoid frequent full discharges. In contrast to NiCd (Nickel-cadmium) and NiMh (Nickel-metal hydride) batteries, Li-ion (Lithium-ion) batteries show no memory effect. That is, it will do no harm to the battery if it is re-charged before it is empty. Full discharges will strain the battery.

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When I bought a new notebook recently, I resolved to take better care of my laptop battery this time than I had with my previous ones. With my last laptops the battery was more or less dead after a year or so. If a battery is treated with care it can last up to four years. I thought that I knew how a notebook battery has to be handled, but after googling this topic, I realized that quite a few of my beliefs were outdated. Most of my layman’s knowledge about rechargeable batteries was related to Nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) and nickel-cadmium (NiCd) batteries, which are no longer used in laptops (as far as I know). In this post, I summarize the tips I found on the web to preserve lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, which are probably in most laptops nowadays.

There are two important keywords when it comes to battery preservation: charging and temperature. That is, how the batteries are charged, and the temperatures to which they are exposed, are key factors that determine their lifespan. Today I will write about how temperature influences the lifespan of a laptop battery, and in my next post I will cover charging and discharging.

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Some days ago, I discussed a couple of features that only come into play if Vista and Server 2008 work together. Today, I stumbled across another Microsoft page listing several of these features. Unfortunately, it also contains features that are available as extensions for Windows XP. However, some of them seem to be Vista/2008 only features.

First of all, I should note that I was quite surprised how difficult it is to find out what these “better-together features” really are. Microsoft’s marketing texts give hints, but they also do their best to disguise the real benefits of Vista+Server 2008. Journalists tend to just copy Microsoft, often without really understanding what it is all about.

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The adoption of Windows Vista in corporate environments is probably not as fast as Microsoft had hoped for. The question is, can Windows Server 2008 accelerate Vista adoption after it’s released? This certainly depends on the features that can only be used if you deploy Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista together. In this post, I examine all these features I am aware of.

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Just in case my blog post on Monday didn’t convince you that it’s is worth to upgrade to Vista, you should have a look at this impressive feature list at Microsoft. I don’t know if it is new, but I just saw this in a Microsoft Newsletter. I think this site confirms what I said before. Vista has no wow features, but so many tiny improvements which when summed up makes your daily work more productive. And I bet that you’ll find at least one feature that might turn out as your personal wow feature. This list could also be useful if you want to convince your boss to upgrade to Vista in your organization. For this, you only have to find her or his personal wow feature.

I am somehow surprised how many Google users come to my blog searching for Vista keyboard shortcuts. It seems it is widely unknown that Vista has an excellent help file. It lists all shortcut keys. Since I can’t link to this list, I just copied all shortcuts to this post.

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Microsoft published a couple of step-by-step guides for sys admins. I think I saw some of them on Technet before. This page lists many important guides as Word files. When I skimmed over the titles, I realized that there are quite a few new things to learn for sysops. This reminds me of a remark Bill Gates made some years ago. He said that in the future Windows will be so easy to manage that there will be less need for system administrators.

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Update: If you are interested in improving Vista’s performance you might be interested in this post, too: 50 ways to speed up Vista

SpeedyVista has a comprehensive list of Vista’s services accompained by some explanation regarding their purpose. The list distinguishes between the different Vista editions: Home Basic, Home Premium, Business and Ultimate. You can use this list to disable unnecessary services to speed up Vista and, more importantly, as reference guide.

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This article describes 3 ways how to disable indexing in Vista: Indexing options in the Control Panel, folder properties and disable Windows Search service.

Update: I have written a new article about turning off indexing in Windows 7 and Vista, which I recommend to read first. If you installed Vista SP1, there are other ways to disable indexing.

Vista comes with a new indexing service which improves desktop search. It not only makes search faster, but also adds some nice features. The one I like most is that it allows you to search very fast for mails in Outlook. There are, however, cases where you might want to disable Vista’s search indexing.

Good desktop search tools index your hard disk only whenever the PC is idle. This seems to be different with Vista. I often saw the corresponding processes (SearchProtocolHost, SearchFilterHost, SearchIndexer) active even though my computer was quite busy with other tasks. This can decrease the overall performance tremendously.

Another reason why you might want to disable Vista search indexing is, if you are using another desktop search solution. Or perhaps you only rarely search for files on your PC. If it is not the reduced performance, then it could be the constant activity of your hard disk, whenever indexing starts, that might get on your nerves. And if you install Vista in a virtual environment, for example, VMware Workstation or Virtual PC, I recommend disabling it anyway since it will slow down your VM significantly.

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VMware Workstation 6.0 Beta 3 (build 39849) has been available for some days now. I tried it today on a Vista host because VMware Workstation 5.5 runs quite unstable there. Since version 6.0 promises Vista support, I was hoping that I could use the Beta instead of version 5.5.

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You don't know where Documents and Settings in Windows Vista and Windows 7 is? Here you will learn how you can access Documents and Settings.

You probably know that the C:\Documents and Settings folder doesn’t exist anymore in Vista. It was replaced by the C:\Users and C:\ProgramData. Vista uses symbolic links pointing to these new folders for compatibility reasons. However, many guides still refer to the old folder structure. There is a simple trick for using the old folder name in Windows Explorer, though. This way you can find configuration files easier.

If you want to see the symbolic links, you have to enable first “Show hidden files and folders” in Folder Options. To access the Folder Options you must press “ALT” in Windows Explorer to make the menu visible. You’ll find them under tools.

Now, you should be able to see Documents and Settings. But if you double click on it, you’ll get an error messages. Even administrators don’t have enough NTFS rights to navigate to this folder. It is not even possible if you change the rights by taking the ownership.

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I like Vista. Really! Some of its new features are very nice! I only wonder, when will the final version of Windows Vista be available? Wait a minute! Didn’t Microsoft just release it? Yeah, they did. Still I continue to wonder, when the final of Windows Vista will be available.

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Since running VMware Workstation 5.5 on my Vista PC with a duo core CPU, I always get this message “Your host’s BIOS does not have valid NUMA information” whenever I start a virtual machine and my host system is blocked for some minutes. The message also refers to two knowledge base articles (document ID 938 and 1236). Since I know that many of my readers are moving to Vista with duo core CPUs these days, I will post the solution to the problem here.

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Microsoft’s official recommendations are 512MB for a “Vista capable PC” and 1GB for “Vista Premium Ready“. Of course, nobody takes such recommendations seriously, anymore. Steve Row, a Microsoft employee, just posted an interesting comparison with the memory requirements for Windows XP.

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