Keeping your emails up-to-date can prove challenging as your email client cannot connect to the Internet while your computer is in standby or sleep mode. This means every morning when you open your Windows 8 laptop, you must wait until all your emails, news, social networks are downloaded.

One way to solve the problem is to open the laptop regularly at short intervals and download a few new emails each time. This way you will not face a situation where hordes of your emails are being downloaded at one instance. However, there’s one problem: your laptop’s battery will drain very quickly if you open it at regular short intervals.

Many companies have been, for quite some time now, working hard to find a solution to this problem, but it is Intel that has come up with a novel innovation that may well end this issue once and for all.

With Intel’s latest Smart Connect Technology, users can stay current with their emails, social networks, and more. While your laptop is asleep or in standby, this technology periodically wakes your laptop to allow open applications to receive data from the Internet.

The two most notable features of Smart Connect Technology are:

• It allows you to manually set the frequency with which it checks for update
• It automatically reduces the update frequency, if you have not set any, when the battery is running low

Laptops, invariably, lose their battery capacity over time. Smart Connect Technology is a great way of staying current without using much battery power. Some other ways through which you can improve your laptop’s battery life are:

• Adjust screen’s brightness – A bright laptop can guzzle a lot of battery power. Therefore, you are better off keeping the brightness as low as possible. Additionally, turn off keyboard backlighting, if present.
• Remove any unused external device – Plugged-in external devices constantly draw power from the connected laptop. You are recommended to remove any attached device after use.
• Use a laptop cooler – Overheating can cause your battery life to drain more quickly. To prevent this, use a laptop cooler.
• Defrag regularly – The faster your laptop’s hard drive works the longer its battery will last. The most effective way to improve your hard drive’s performance is to defrag it on a regular basis.

Regular defragmentation not only improves your laptop’s battery life, but it also improves your laptop’s overall performance. Other tips for improving your laptop’s performance include: performing regular disk cleanup, removing unwanted startup programs, and using a reliable and effective pc optimization tool.