James:
The article you linked to on “Nine ways to make your cell phone last the whole storm even if the power goes out” was interesting but missed a couple of key points:
If you’re going to charge the phone from your laptop, only leave your laptop on as long as needed to charge the phone to about 80%, then shut it down again. Cell phone charging slows down as the battery gets closer to full, and it’s very inefficient to run the laptop while the phone is only gaining a small amount of charge.
Test to see if you can charge your phone while your laptop is “asleep”. Some laptops allow this, a side effect of a feature that allows USB devices to wake up the laptop.
Turn off all data services, which is pretty easy on advanced phones. If data services are off, there’s no need to worry about turning off push notifications.
Also turn off 2.5G (sometimes shown as GPRS), 2.75G (EDGE), 3G (UMTS, HSPA, etc.). None of these features are needed for basic phone calls and text messaging. Regards, – P.N.G.