new laptop battery usage
2014-07
user3509869
This question already has an answer here:
Benedikt
You might be interested in this question. Recommended is the following: When you don't need the battery, charge it to 40-60%, remove it and store it in a cool place (ideal is 10 to 20°C). Make sure to do some 20-80% cycles every quarter, though. It's generally a good idea to use the wall plug with removed battery when you run CPU/GPU-heavy applications like games with 3D graphics. Fluctuating voltage shouldn't be too big of a problem, as your charger will mitigate that.
Joey
Ignore posts about charging the battery to a certain percentage, and draining... this was true many years ago for old style batteries. Not important anymore.
SSAURABHH
It depends on your battery backup! when playing on battery,ensure that your power configuration is on balanced or high performance so that your 'heavy' game can use all resources(processor) because in power saving mode,its block to using all resources to use to save power! If you are worry about your battery,so you need to know that if your battery is 100% charge and your lappy is plugged in,then it uses power directly not from battery!so don't worry about it! Use full charge and full discharge method to increase battery life!
So in short play games with plugged in until you want to play outside of the home or power cuttage ! (Use some game boosters too :) ) If you need some more help then commnet! :)
smc
I disagree with both Shiki and Dave Rook. This information is so yesterday. All modern laptops have smart battery management systems. These systems will perform partial charge/discharge cycles without user even noticing it. Also the battery technology has improved through last years and modern batteries are much more reliable.
Saying that leaving the battery in your laptop DOES decrease battery life is equivalent to saying that using the battery does decrease the battery life. And what else did you expect? An alternative to using the batter is not using the battery which adds up to running off the AC. And OP has clearly mentioned power fluctuations. So you are suggesting the guy with no stable AC supply to remove his battery?
With modern laptop and a decent battery, even if you keep it in the machine at all times and you have AC adapter online 90% of the time, your laptop will become old and outdated or it will malfunction long time before your battery deteriorates to unusable state. Also, if by some chance your battery does deteriorate, buying a new one is much cheaper then getting yourself a UPS and much much cheaper then suffering losses that you might get if your laptop powers off and loses data.
So the answer is, if you have power fluctuations in your area, DO NOT remove the battery ever, as you will be in the risk of shutting off power to the running machine and losing valuable data.
Also, since modern laptops perform clever battery management routines, you manually messing around with the charging/discharging will only make it worse. The technology is there to make your life easier. Just sit back and enjoy.
You can also read this short article. There is plenty of the information on the web about how to properly take care of your batteries, but remember that a lot them will be outdated, as the technology is developing quickly.
Most laptop batteries these days are Lithium Ion based - so constant charging won't hurt them. This seems logical as most people don't even realise that batery care is even "a thing" let alone important.
Good tips for looking after a battery include:
- Avoid frequent complete discharge of a batter as contraty to popular belief, this can actually put strain on a lithium battery.
- Keep the battery and laptop cool. No notter than 95degrees for an extended period of time.
- Consider removing the battery if you are planning to work the laptop hard on mains for an extended period of time
- Calibrate your battery and guage by doing occasional (not frequent) full discharge/charge cycles
- Lithium batteries degrade over time - when buying a new battery for your laptop, buy a "new" battery - not one from old stock
- When storing the laptop unused for a long period of time, store it with some charge, but not full charge and do a calibration charge when you put it back into service.
- Storing at 100% or empty is bad for the battery. try storing at half charge or just below
- Look into buying high capacity batteries rather than spares - this can often server better.
Most important out of the above is to remember that heat destroys batteries a lot faster than a bad charge/discharge pattern. Lithium batteries are "memory free" which means that charging from part-charged or not doesn't make much of an impact (if any) and most damage done over a long, bad charge/discharge life can be undone with a calibration or two.
This document (although not the source for my info) contains mostly the same information and probably explains better than I could
Senseful
After reading the information on http://batteryuniversity.com, I realize that one of the best ways to permanently damage a lithium ion battery is to use the battery at a high temperature while it's fully charged. This is exactly what happens when you use the computer as if it were a desktop computer, since leaving it plugged in will keep the battery at 100% and using the computer will heat up the battery. This is why it's recommend to remove the battery from your laptop if you are using it is this scenario.
My question is what would you do if the laptop doesn't have removable batteries (e.g. a MacBook Pro)?
Should I use some kind of charge cycle such as: charge to 80%, unplug the power chord, use the laptop until it reaches 20%, then repeat the cycle by charging to 80% again?
If so, which values should I use instead of 80% and 20%? (I think charging to 80% is better than 100% because of the damage that a hot battery at 100% can do, but I just made the figure 80% up, and I'm sure there's a better number to strive for which is backed by science.)
I've read many of the articles on batteryuniversity.com, but couldn't find anything pertaining to this.
Update: What about doing something like charge (or discharge) it to 50%, then plug it in and turn on settings which use the battery as much as possible (e.g. brightness all the way up, wi-fi on, etc.), in order to try to maintain the battery at 50% (i.e. the rate it is charging is the same as it is discharging). This will probably heat up the battery, but would make it so you don't need to constantly plug and unplug the laptop. The one bad thing is that you are taking up more charge cycles which would decrease the battery life, thus I'm not sure this is a good idea.
digitxp
Usually it would be good to keep the battery between 80-ish and 20-ish percent full, it would extend the battery life, but how long will it be extended? The battery is virtually guaranteed to lose its capacity after two years. Probably a more realistic (or pessimistic, depending on how you see it) is to grab an AppleCare package then when the battery loses its charge significantly they can replace it for you.