How to prolong Laptop (Li-ion) battery life
by Jonathan on 28th Nov 2009 in Hardware
Laptops batteries are a pain. After a couple of years we’ve all found that or battery life has dropped from the 4 hours we got originally down to 30 minutes if we’re lucky.
I’ve decided therefore to try and come up with some simple rules for making sure my laptop batteries last much longer than this, hopefully for many years.
My own personal experience of this (the most recent one anyway) was with my wife’s Dell Inspiron 1525. It’s just over a year and a half old and gets at most 30 minutes of when not plugged in. Naturally I kicked off with Dell (with whom I have a 4 year warranty for the machine) but they said that the battery wasn’t covered and a new one would be £99. So I told them to sod off.
I read around on the web, looking for tips to try and prevent this in future and found that we’d probably been making a few basic mistakes withour battery care. I’ve tried to summarise the tips here. There are 3 things that every site mentioned so I’m going to assume they are the most accurate. I don’t claim to be an expert, but I’m going to try them myself. I’ll update this post in the future with results.
Take the battery out
If you’re plugged into the mains, and will be for a while, take the battery out. Leaving it in will lead to its temperature increasing (more on why that’s bad in a minute). In fact my battery it sitting on my desk as I write this, at 40% charge.
Store the battery at 40% charge
If you’re going to store the battery for a while, do it at 40% charge, and in a cool dry place.
Keep it cool
Heat will kill your battery. So don’t leave your laptop in a warm place (by a radiator, in the car etc).
Don’t drain to zero
I don’t mean 0%, when your laptop will go into standby. I mean fully empty i.e. what will happen if you leave the laptop on standby with an empty battery. Even standy mode uses a small amount of power to keep a charge going through RAM. This is how standby can resume so quickly to the desktop. So eventually the battery will be fully empty and will probably never be the same again.
That’s all for now, I’ll let you know how I get on.
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About the author
Jonathan Phillips is the founder and main author here on Division by Zero. A PHP developer by trade, Jonathan spends his days building and marketing websites at his company, Phillips Internet Limited and the rest of the time coming up with ideas for websites and businesses he hasn't got time to implement.
