extending the life of a laptop battery

oldsak

This laptop is my first laptop. Its a Dell Inspiron e1505. I purchased it about 10 months ago for school. For about a month now I've been getting warnings that the battery is nearing the end of its usable life. As I am a student, I'm not really too excited about paying out for a new battery after less than a year.

Does anyone have any general usage tips that will help me get more than a year out of a new battery?

The_Scarab

The fewer recharges you perform the better.

Though draining it to zero is also bad.

Wait till its like 5% then charge once to 100%.

This is how to extend all battery lives.

onceling

I think a lot of Dell laptop batteries do have a 1 year warranty. If you get on it now, you might be able to get it replaced right away under that. Obviously depends on your purchase details specifically but worth checking into.

I just got 2 years out of a Dell gaming laptop battery that I treated like dirt, daily, so I think 10 months is a bit short.

But yeah I don't have any suggestions not already mentioned for your next, new battery.

Ruckus

Man less than a year is waaaaay too soon for it to be giving you that warning. Call Dell.

But for future batteries, Charging them up and then wearing them down is the way to go. You don't have to use them all the way to dead, I usually just go down to the warning level (10% on my laptop) and then plug it in again.

Cycophant

Didn't we just have a thread like this a month or so ago, and the final advice given by someone who really knew about batteries was that the best way of extending the life of the types of batteries typically found in laptops was to NOT run the battery down?

I'll see if I can find the thread, because it went through all the various arguments pretty well, but I'm positive the best advice was that you run the laptop from the battery as little as possible, because of the nature of the types of batteries used in notebooks...

vonPoonBurGer

Cycophant wrote: »

Didn't we just have a thread like this a month or so ago, and the final advice given by someone who really knew about batteries was that the best way of extending the life of the types of batteries typically found in laptops was to NOT run the battery down?

For most modern laptop batteries, you do NOT want to cycle the battery very often. This was something you had to do with old nickel-cadmium (NiCad) and nickel-metal-hydride (NiMH) batteries in order to avoid a "battery memory" effect. Modern lithium-ion batteries don't suffer from the same problem, and frequent cycling (going from 100% to 0% charge and back again) will shorten their lifespan. In normal usage, a lithium-ion battery loses roughly 20% of its capacity per year, but it can vary quite a lot depending on how it's used and what temperature it's normally kept at. Wikipedia has more details.

Ten months seems really craptacular, OP, I'd pester HP support, see if you can get them to spring for a replacement. The battery you have is either defective, it was subjected to some rough treatment, or it came out of inventory somewhere and had lost a lot of its capacity before you even got it. Does the battery have a date of manufacture on it?

Regina Fong

Interestingly, the care instructions that came with my Macbook tell me to run the battery down to the warning level, then let it go into sleep mode, then let the battrery run completely to dead, then to charge it to 100% (without turning it back on) once every few months. They said it maintains the battery. Lies?

Dark Moon

jeepguy wrote: »

Interestingly, the care instructions that came with my Macbook tell me to run the battery down to the warning level, then let it go into sleep mode, then let the battrery run completely to dead, then to charge it to 100% (without turning it back on) once every few months. They said it maintains the battery. Lies?

I am pretty sure that's just to calibrate the Battery Charge Monitor that the OS uses to give you your estimated time remaining.

AtomBomb

Yeah, that's just so the laptop knows what full is and what zero is. Usually it has to guesstimate, and it gets less accurate over time. Then you end up with a battery that has a decent charge, but the laptop thinks it's on the verge of empty and forces a shutdown.

oldsak

So after finally getting dell support it turns out they only expect batteries to live 12 - 24 months, and while they do replace batteries under 12 months, they count from the manufacture date, not from the sale of my laptop. So my battery is 16 months old, and I get nothing. I looked online at their store for batteries and the user ratings were crap for the ones they offer with most people complaining about the life.

So that pretty much blows.