A new laptop battery comes supplied in a discharged condition and requires charging before use. Refer to your user's manual for the charging instrucitons and be aware that the laptop battery will achieve its full charging capacity after a couple of charging cycles.
An important thing to practice to maintain for your NiCad laptop replacement batteries maximum power and life is to drain the power from your laptop battery completely every two or three weeks. For Li-Ion laptop batteries, it is good practice to simply use your laptop computer on battery power and recharge it when the battery utility warns you that the battery's power is low.
In the event that you will not use your laptop PC for a month or longer, it is adviseable to remove the battery and locate it in a dry, cool and a clean place. A battery which is completely charged finally may lose its charge if it remains unused for long period of time. Laptop betteries will generally warm up during their charging phase, therefore be careful when handling replacement laptop batteries while they are charging.
It’s good practice that you clean the battery and computer's contacts with a lint free cloth and rubbing alcohol if the contacts become dirty. This will help you maintain a good power connection and will provide a more efficient power operation of your laptop. It will also help prolong the life of your laptop battery.
To conserve power when you are not near an electrical outlet, it is a good ides to limit the peripheral devices and software programs that are being used. Extraneous hardware devices and running programs consume power. The best way to reduce power consumption in a laptop computer is to reduce the brightness of the display panel.
Your replacement laptop battery's run time will be dependent not only on the aforementioned hardware and software devices that are being used by the computer, but by the settings in your power management utility program. Make sure that you optimize the power management settings to get the maximum operating time from your replacement laptop battery.
