One of the things you should definitely do for your laptop is to get a bag or case to carry it in.  If you move your laptop around at all (and why do you have a laptop if you don’t?) then there’s a good chance you’ll be knocking it around on things, and this is very bad for your laptop.

Here’s our tip for keeping the laptop bag/case cheap.  Chances are you’re not going to get a good deal when you but your “cheapest laptop.”  This is because retailers see your laptop purchase as a good time to sell you accessories to make more profit.  They’re not trying to lure you in with a great price on the laptop case/bag.  They’ve already lured you in with a cheap price on the laptop itself, and now they’re trying to capitalize on that.

So make your laptop bag purchase separately.  Sometimes you’ll find a good deal online, but I’ve found that some of the best deals are found in brick and mortar stores.  Just look around for a while and then find a bag that is on sale.

One of the things about buying a cheaper laptop is that you normally don’t get the hightest capacity batteries, which means you will generally have less time when going without an electrical outlet.  The exception to this is usually a netbook which, because of their lower power use, often have excellent battery life.  But no matter what kind of notebook you have, there are things you can do to extend the time of battery-only operation.

Probably the easiest and most effective thing you can do is to dim your screen brightness.  Apart from the screen the things that will eat your battery are high CPU usage, the hard drive, the optical drive, and WiFi/wireless.

To avoid high CPU usage disable any services and close programs you aren’t using.  I’ve found that the biggest source of unnecessary CPU usage for me web pages that I’m not looking at.  That’s right, even if you aren’t looking at a web page, different objects on it could be eating your CPU and sucking down your battery as well.  It’s best to close web pages that you don’t need open.  Another culprit may be your virus scanner.  You should scan your hard drive for viruses regularly, but not when you’re on battery power.

It may not be feasible to cut down on hard drive usage since if you’re writing to the hard drive it’s probably something you need to do.  Don’t quit periodically saving the document you’re writing.  That would be “penny wise and pound foolish.”  One notable exception I can think of is if you have too many programs open using too much memory causing your laptop to swap memory.  That’s bad (for performance) even if you aren’t trying to save battery life.

The only time I can think of that you might be unnecessarily using your optical drive is if you have some file open from it that you could copy to your hard drive.  That’s better for performance to, so always a good idea.

And if you’re not using your WiFi or wireless connection, most laptops have a way to turn it off manually.  This is because the wireless card will use battery life looking for available networks all of the time, whether or not you want to connect, whether or not there are any available.  So find the button or key combination that turns off the wireless radio if you don’t need it.

We all know that you need to perform regular maintenance on your car if you want to keep it running smoothly for a long time.  But do you need to do the same thing for your laptop?

Well, there isn’t any oil to change, but you’ve probably heard that you need to defrag your hard drive regularly, run virus scans, etc.  Do you really need to do these things?

10 years ago you did need to defrag your hard drive, but that just doesn’t apply today if (and this is a big if) you don’t let your hard drive get too full.  Modern file systems automatically keep file defragmentation low while doing their business.  However, if the hard drive gets too full (say, less than 10% free space), then the file system will not be able to keep fragmentation low.  So instead defragging, your time would be better spent making sure your hard drive isn’t too full and deleting unnecessary files if it is.

What about virus scans?  They’re certainly not a bad idea, and many virus scans set up a daily scan during their installation, so there’s a chance you’re already having the scan done.  But the real-time protection is the main thing you need.

What about software updates?  This is another thing that used to be important, but isn’t so much any more.  Developers have learned that if software needs to be updated, then the default action should be to update automatically.  Chances are you don’t need to worry about manually updating software.

You should definitely be backing up your data regularly and frequently.  Your hard drive could crash at any time with no warning and you could lose all of the files on the system.  The chance of this happening on any given day is small, but it is not insignificant.  Eventually every hard drive fails.  Chances are your data is more too important to chance it.  Of course, this isn’t really laptop maintenance, but data maintenance.  However, it’s important enough and overlooked enough that it should be mentioned at any opportunity.

Having antivirus on your computer is more than a good idea. It’s almost a requirement. But it doesn’t help you to get a good deal on a cheap laptop and then spend loads of money on virus protection. Luckily there are several free antivirus solutions out there, and even more luckily a few of them are quite good. Here are three good suggestions:

Avast Home Edition Free Antivirus - Many people say that Avast is the best free solution out there.  One major plus is that it includes spyware protection as well as virus protection.

Avira Personal Free Antivirus - Avira is another great free solution.  It doesn’t specifically claim to have spyware protection, but while the spyware coverage is not comprehensive is it some coverage.  The full spyware protection is in the paid version.  If you decide to use Avira, you should pair it with some spyware protection.

AVG Antivirus Free Edition - I have used AVG myself on several systems myself and I’ve been happy with it.  It does include both virus and spyware protection.  But many people don’t rank it highest because more is left out of the free version and left for the paid version.