What is the best way to maximize the life of my laptop battery?

Does it have a short battery life? Also, don’t put in a charger for longer than it needs to be, as in if your battery is 100% don’t leave the charger in because that will damage the battery life.

ok will unplug it. battery life is about two hours.

Ok I so don’t mean to hijack this thread, but @mollypop51797 if you did leave your laptop plugged in all the time and the battery life is awful is there a way to reverse the damage or do I just need to get a new battery? I know its probably a stupid question, but I’m not good with these kind of things.

If your battery life is about 2 hours then I would guess that a year ago it was about 2¼ to 2½. Lithium-ion batteries lose capacity over time naturally, and they lose it a little faster if stored fully charged and much quicker at higher temperatures.

Leaving the charger plugged in won’t really affect it as much as some people think since the power management will cut the charger off when the battery is full, but it also means that the battery is fully charged all the time so it will lose capacity somewhat quicker.

However, that loss pales in comparison to the losses caused by calender age as certain parts of the battery interact with the air, and the temperatures that they typically operate at (remember, the battery is typically fairly close to the CPU and heats up a little on it’s own anyways due to current draw and internal resistance) will kill it even faster.

I believe that typical loss for a LiON battery is in the range of 20–30%/year under normal use and as bad as 80% in three months if you store it fully charged at temperatures normally encountered in a parked car during the summer (~140F).

@sjmc1989 There is no way to undo the damage. Sorry :(

@jerv Thanks. Oh well :(

Now, if you just want to extend the time between charges then your best bet is proper power management.

Personally, mine is set to power down the hard drive after 3 minutes of non-use so that saves a bit of juice right there. If you are not surfing then shutting off the wifi helps out considerably; I’ve gone from 2:45 to >3:10 that way. One other big draw is the backlight. If I close the lid on mine, the backlight shuts off. I can come back five hours later (mine is set to not automatically sleep or hibernate until the battery reaches 3%) and still have 20% left on my 2½ hour battery. That tells me that half of my power goes to the backlight. Even setting it dimmer helps a bit; I get an extra 20 minutes that way.

Oh, and Lithium-ion batteries have no memory effect to speak of. Anybody who says otherwise must be thinking of the old NiCads from decades ago. Apple stopped using them in laptops in the mid-‘90s and I don’t think I’ve seen anybody else use them in a computer since.

It’s true, it’s true. I just replaced my laptop battery, which eventually showed only 15 minutes remaining at 99% charge. LOL
You can get good replacements at lowball prices on ebay.

One thing I forgot to mention. LiON batteries have a fairly poor cycle life though, so running it dead and then recharging it will knock more off of the capacity than keeping it topped up all the time

My one-year-old netbook is plugged in ~¾ of the time whether I am using it or not (I usually use it sitting on the couch at home) and it still has >90% of it’s capacity. Considering the way LiON batteries are, that no worse (and probably better) than it would be if I ran on battery power most of the time.

@jerv would using a program to keep the battery at 90% full capacity extend its life?

@LocoLuke I am unaware of any such program since that is more of a firmware thing but it wouldn’t help terribly much anyways. You probably won’t make your battery last appreciably better than I have.

Maybe if you did it at 50% (give or take) the effects of time will be reduced notably, but considering that I like to have a run time of over 1:30 when I pull the plug, that really isn’t practical for me.

Regardless, you won’t get a laptop LiON pack to last well for more than 3 years and 18–24 months is more typical for high-drain devices like laptops. Low-drain devices like cellphones and MP3 players fare better if for no reason other than the fact that their low drain results in lower temperatures, often low enough that the battery doesn’t heat up due to internal resistance and there are no major heat-generating components nearby like you have in a laptop.

On the plus side, battery technology is evolving all the time. I remeber when I was into R/C cars as a teen, the battery packs I used had NiCad (Nickel-Cadmium) C-cells that held half the power of a NiMH (Nickel Metal Hydride) AA Energizer like the ones I use in my camera twenty years later.

I’ve heard it’s best to constantly deplete it (not the full 100% though) and recharge it.
It’s for the same reasons they say you better charge your phone all the way to 100% first right after you’ve bought it.
It’s because of the memory effect of batteries.
I’ve also been told you don’t need to do that with lithium, but I’ve also kinda experienced that’s not really true.

NiCads need to be cycled and they have a harsh memory effect so you really want to run them dead and then fully charge them every time. I’ve lost a few battery packs (cordless phones and cordless tools) that way.

LiON packs (most lpatops, cellphones, and MP3 players today) need a full cycle on initial purchase to calibrate the power monitoring and need an occasional cycling to recalibrate but it’s more about the calibration than conditioning the pack. However, you do not want to run a LiON pack down and store it “dead”.
Once you get below abut 2–3% charge, you risk cell-reversal (and thus irreversible cell death) unless the cells in the pack are matched pretty well. Some places make sure to make their multi-cell packs out of cells that have the same discharge curve, but some will just slap together a group of mismatched cells so it’s possible that one cell may run dead before the others. Also, the monitoring hardware in most packs puts a small drain on the pack in addition to it’s self-discharge. (LiON cells have a low rate of self-discharge compared to NiCad or NiMH, but they still discharge themselves at ~2%/month)
Net effect is that if you store a pack that has been depleted to 2% then by the time you use it again it may be at -5%; cell reversal. And once that happens, it’s like trying to turn a pickle back into a cucumber.

Two of the advantages of LiON batteries over other rechargeables are the low self-discharge rate and the lack of a memory effect. The decent energy/weight ratio is a plus as well considering that we like our electronics small yet still want them to last all day on a charge.

@jerv Loved your pickle to cucumber analogy.