Laptop Battery - Preserving Its Life

There are many sites that talk about how to preserve laptop battery life. There is also conflicting information.

So, is there a definitive answer on how to keep laptop battery in good condition?
Should the battery be periodically discharged? If so, how often and to what level should it be discharged.

Thank you.

 

I personally have left my 10 year old Toshiba notebook plugged into the charger 24/7 for weeks and months on end and still get nearly 2 hours of run time, down from 2 hours 45 minutes when new. I consider that great performance for a 10 year old battery. That said, I do about once a month or two, run my notebook on battery until it shuts down on its own. But that is really to ensure the battery monitoring circuits are properly synchronized ("calibrated") with the battery. It is not to prolong the life of the battery. I feel I have already gotten more than I could ever have hoped for.

So to answer your question, NO! There is no definitive answere. So the best advice I can give is for you to follow the guidance given in your notebook's owner's manual.

 

Same here with two Acer netbooks. The battery in the netbook purchased in August 2011 needed a new battery in March 2017. I don't consider more than 5 years on the original battery to be bad based on what we've done.

I haven't run a battery down until it shuts off except when it was new or I replaced the original battery and the directions instructed me to "condition" it.

 

You don't need to as long as your notebook's monitoring features (showing how much "estimated" runtime is left on current charge) is fairly accurate. We have to remember they are rough estimates because the program does not know how hard or easy we will be tasking our notebooks during the next (future) minutes. It can only guess based on how we are currently tasking it, and how we have been using it thus far during this session.

While Li-Ion batteries do suffer from memory effect, it is nothing near the problem old NiCad batteries had. So really, they don't need "conditioning". That is just a left-over term from NiCad days. But calibrating or synchronizing the charge/discharge rate to the monitoring program is some times needed. That's where running it down until it shuts down comes in and that is probably in your manual too.

 

I installed a battery program, which is more reliable than the one with the laptop. I tested 5 programs and settled on Battery Bar. (not on MajorGeeks)

Then you can always open an elevated command prompt and type in

Code:

powercfg energy

to determine errors, warnings and information about the battery.
There is also a report saved to C:\Windows\system32\energy-report.html