Extend the Life of Your Laptop Battery

Laptop owners inevitably notice that the health of their laptop batteries steadily degrades, with the amount of time the battery can provide power to the computer slowly dwindling away. After two or three years, many laptop batteries degrade so badly they become nearly useless. The whole point of owning a laptop is its portability, and those lithium-ion batteries are expensive. That makes taking steps to keep your laptop battery healthy both an essential cost-cutting measure and a step to preserve the utility of your laptop.

1. Set up your laptop on a hard surface whenever possible, and only use it in cool places. Likewise, store the laptop battery in a cool place when it is not in use. Heat is a major factor in degrading the performance of laptop batteries, and not setting the laptop on a hard surface compounds the issue by reducing the efficiency of its cooling fan. Taking your laptop to the beach and typing away on your lap in full summer sunlight will greatly degrade the battery.

2. Take your battery out of the laptop once it is fully charged. Even modern laptops allow some electricity to trickle into the battery after it is fully charged, and overcharging degrades the battery. Never simply leave a fully charged battery in the laptop with the laptop plugged in for hour after hour, even if you are using the laptop.

3. Run your laptop on the battery regularly. Even if your laptop is a desktop replacement unit and rarely leaves the house, you should put the battery in the computer every few days and run the computer off of it for a couple of hours. Then recharge the battery and put it back into storage. A fully charged battery left in storage will degrade much more quickly than a battery receiving a little regular use.

4. Charge a depleted battery promptly, and never let a depleted battery sit without a charge for more than two days. While you should not be afraid of drawing the power on your laptop battery down to low levels, leaving it almost completely drained of power for prolonged periods of time damages the battery. If you leave it in a drained state long enough, the battery might stop working altogether.'

Sources:
helpdesk.lib.umich.edu/documentation/laptopbattery.asp
its.frc.mass.edu/itn/students/Healthy_Laptop.pdf
batteryuniversity.com/parttwo-34.htm
zbattery.com/laptopbatterycare.html