Notebooks or laptops have pretty much run over the desktop market these past few years. They have become cheaper and cheaper, you can bring them anywhere and their processing power is enough for most people.

The only reason I can see, in obtaining a desktop computer, would be if you need tremendous processing power for video processing, gaming, audio/video encoding and other processor-heavy tasks.

Here are some tips to help your notebook or laptop battery last longer:

1. Dim your screen.

Use the lowest possible brightness setting that your eyes are comfortable with.

2. Disable WiFi, Infrared and Bluetooth

These laptop features eat up battery if they’re turned on. WiFi will continuously look for hotspots to connect to. Bluetooth and Infrared will continuously look for devices to connect with.

3. Set your power settings properly.

Check your power options and tune it to your working habits. Turning the LCD monitor off automatically after a period of inactivity helps you keep the battery running longer. Turning the hard disks off and going into sleep mode also helps.

4. Remove any optical media from your drives.

The motor on the optical drive (CD/DVD drive) spins and consumes power even if you do not access the drive.

5. Refrain from using externally connected devices.

Be content with the trackpad (or touchpad) on your laptop. Using any form of externally connected devices connected to the various ports of the laptop computer will consume additional power. These includes external hard drives, mice, webcams, laptop coolers and ExpressCards.

6. Avoid running processor-intensive applications.

These include programs which are used to encode audio/video, gaming, listening to multimedia material such as music and videos.

7. Lower your speaker volume or better yet, turn your sounds off.

The higher the speaker volume, the more power is being consumed. If you really need to have sound, try to avoid turning the speaker volume all the way up. If you can, refrain from using speakers.

8. Lessen background-running applications.

You should only tinker with this if you know your way around the Task Manager. Kill processes or stop running programs that are not being used.

9. Consider investing in a battery with a larger capacity.

Laptops typically come with 4-cell or 6-cell batteries. Optional 9-cell and 12-cell batteries are commonly available from the laptop manufacturer. Higher capacity batteries greatly lengthen your usage time. Getting a high capacity is a good investment especially if you are mobile most of the time.