Help!! I have retarded questions!

I just got a new Toshiba L300-04P (Canada) and had some questions:

1) Am I supposed to leave the battery in if I have my laptop plugged in with the AC adapter. That is if the battery is already fully charged, is there a danger of overcharging? Or does the battery stay in at all times?

2) Is there a guide specific to Toshibas or this model on how to optimize, tuneup and get rid of crapware?

3) On Vista Home Premium, how do I change the taskbar colour? I already hate the black/grey colour it's annoying as hell.

4) Is it normal to have 65 (!) processes running at the same time? I just have Firefox and Task Manager open. If I do that on my old desktop running XP I have less than half that.

TIA

 

You don't need your battery to use your laptop, but you won't hurt it by leaving it in.

 

ahh OK, I was worried about overcharging and accelerating the rate at which the batt. capacity decreases. ty for the answer

 

For a longer battery life, run it down or charge up it to 50% and pull it out of the laptop. You only have a limited number of recharge cycles in the life of the battery and every time you drop the percentage and bring it back up to a 100% it's a cycle. Compal FL9X laptops (maybe some others) have a battery saving program that automatically holds the charge at 50% without ever bringing it up to100%. If you need to run on battery you can over ride the program and charge it to a 100%.

 

To change the task bar color, right click the desktop>left click "personalize">left click "Window color and appearance">pick a different color scheme and hit "apply".

 

Actually it is BEST to leave the battery out of the laptop if you are going to be using AC power, especially long stretches. Leaving it in the laptop just charging it while it is fully charged, can and will shorten the battery life. I hope this helps. God Bless

 

ahh ha that's what I thought, thanks for confirming and the tips guys, and yes it helps a lot. i wish they they made that more clear in the manuals.

thanks again, i figured that out earlier but the colour change is rather minimal at best although that might be Aero. since then i have discovered the joys of hacking the uxtheme file using use create themes to better customize Vista

 

65 process is about normal depending on how much bloatware you have on.

 

ahh thanks, i still havent removed any of it yet so that number is including it. if 65 sounds about right for Vista then it's all good. I just didn't realize Vista had so many more services running in the background than XP for normal operation.