What is the best practice for optimizing the performance of laptop batteries and extending their life?

Question

I had a DELL Inspiron 2500 laptop, and kept the good practice of preserving the laptop battery by charging it till full capacity, unplugging the AC and using it till a fully uncharged status, but it still gone dead after 10-12 months.

Answer 1

Everytime charge untill fully charged......And do not charge again untill prompt for "Low Charge".

Answer 2

Dell Has A Very Large Problem With Laptop Batteries I Suggest Going TO www.dell.com And Talking TO A Tech Support Person Over This Problem.

Answer 3

Erik is correct about Lithium Ion Battery. If your laptop is an Li-Ion battery (most newer laptop and mobile devices use Li-Ion), you'll have longer battery life by keeping the battery at full. And in fact, the habit of fully charging then emptying it, then fully charging again, then emptying again is actually HARMFUL TO Li-Ion BATTERY. It doesn't extend the battery's life but shorten it.

And avoid the laptop from excessive heat, heat isn't a friend of batteries. Keep batteries as cool as possible, but don't let it drop to -40C, as the Lithium would freeze and be unusable.

If you're not gonna use a Li-Ion battery for a long time, keep the battery at 40% full (Do not keep it at near 100% full). An unused battery kept at 100% degrades naturally. Keeping it at 40% reduces the degradation quite considerably. But don't keep the battery at 0% either, since this would make the battery permanently dead, and become a pile of useless Lithium.

And use the battery only when needed. If you're at home, get the battery out from the laptop, and plug the laptop directly to wall power lines. This is easier and extend the life of the battery better than plugging the power line on and off. Remember that heat is battery's archenemy, and laptop is "very cool". This isn't to reduce battery's charge-discharge cycle (as Li-Ion's lifetime isn't determined by how many times the battery is charge and discharged, but more by temperature, this is in contrast to other battery types, like NiMH or NiCad, which life time depends greatly on charge-discharge cycle).

In short:
- Reduce heat as much as possible. Put it on a freezer if needed. But keep it above -40C (most typical home freezer don't get close to this temp.)
- When using wall power, take out the battery, to reduce heat to the battery. It isn't very likely you're gonna have blackouts when using only power line.
- Keep battery not too full, not too empty. When long-term keeping, keep at 40% full.

Answer 4

Batteries gets old. The more you use it, the worse they get. you'll need to buy new ones every now and then. Batteries gets old even if they aren't used. So don't buy two, and save one for later use. In the past people used to say that you should never charge a battery when it wasn't completely uncharged. And you should never charge it halfway. This is not the case anymore. There isn't much you could do to longer your battery life. (you could put it in a waterproof bag, and store it in the fridge when not used this would theoretically longer the lifespan of your battery. is it worth it? ).

Answer 5

Most modern devices (cell phones, laptops, MP3 players, etc.) use lithium ion batteries. Older devices used nickel cadmium batteries. With the older batteries, people were conditioned to use them until they were drained before recharging. Unfortunately lithium ion batteries don't work that way. They are usually best cared for when charged often. But most people are used to the "old" way and haven't been taught any differently.

There's a good amount of data about it on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_ion#Guidelines_for_prolonging_Li-ion_battery_life

Answer 6

The battery of a Laptop is quite sensitive..The best practice is to charge it completely and then remove it...Use it once in a few days..At other times run your Laptop on your AC cable..Use the battery only when you need it...Othertimes just keep it away...If your battery is plugged in even when you ae having ur powercord plugged in, the batterys will very slowly lloose its capacity..

Answer 7

That's the nature of notebook's battery.
The fact that ppl provides multiple versions of tips on how to preserve battery life means that until now there is no solid way to tackle this wholely.

What you are doing is ok.. so just keep doing it.... If possible, use AC ONLY as much as possible. That way the cycle in the battery would be reduced, overall.

Rgds

Answer 8

did you let it charge fully when you first got your laptop or like most people couldn't wait to start using it? modern batteries have a kind of memory that causes it to only charge upto the point where it was first initially charged. don't know if i'm talking out my ar*e but that's what they told my mate about his mobile phone battery.

Answer 9

Better read this first... it helps.

http://www.mobilityguru.com/2006/11/02/how_notebook_batteries_work_and_why_they_blow_up/