I'm leaving for vacation within the next 24 hours, and I noticed it's going to be a 4 hour trip. My laptop battery has decreased in life from about 2 hours to about 45 minutes. Is there a way to recalibrate, or something along those lines, to regain more time on my battery?
I am not suggesting you do this, but back in the OLD days (watch it!) we used to toss our HDD's into the freezer if they were about to crap out and we couldn't get data off of them. Pull it out of the freezer after 25 minutes and hook it up quick resulted in immediate access to our files for a short time So as I said I am not suggesting you do this, but we used that same principle for many types of batteries
This is not the norm with newer batterys anymore. What you need to do is setup a calibration power setting that never turns the computer off if it's in battery mode (you can google how to set it up). Once it is setup you let the computer "Completely die". It will actually shut off with windows running (which is what you want). You then plug it in and let it charge to 100%. With most laptops this completely recalibrates the battyer and I've seen it restore anywhere from 20% to 100% of the missing battery life. I've even done this on a couple of brand new computers and had it increase the original battery life.