Ashford7 asked:
I have a DELL Inspiron 2500 laptop and charge the battery fully and use the computer until the battery is fully discharged. By charging the battery in this manner, the battery was dead after 12 months. What is the best practice to use when charging a laptop battery to prolong its' life?
Pretty much use your current laptop battery charging practice. Wait until the battery level is fairly low….wait for a low charge prompt….and then fully charge. Battery life is generally asociated with the number of charging cycles that the battery completes. This method should minimize this number of cycles.
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.
Dell has a very large problem with laptop batteries. I suggest that you review your problem with a Dell Tech Support Person.
That’s the nature of a notebook’s battery. The fact that there are so many ways that people tell you to charge your laptop battery only confuses people. What you are doing is ok so just keep doing it. If possible, use AC ONLY as much as possible to reduce the useage if the battery.
Did you let it charge fully when you first got your laptop or were you like most people who couldn’t wait to start using it? Modern batteries have a kind of memory that causes it to only charge up to the point where it was first initially charged.
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.