Leaving M11XR2 battery on charger

A simple and quick question: will this affect the lifetime of the battery included in my M11XR2?

 

Yes. If you leave the charger in all the time, and keep the battery topped off at 100% all of the time, then your battery will start to show loss in charge. Typically, you can expect your battery capacity to drop by 50% in about 1.5 to 2.0 years by leaving your laptop plugged in all the time. This behavior is inherent with LiIon technology.

LiIon batteries will last the longest when stored at about 40% charge. To do this on your Alienware M11x, just get the battery to 40% charge. Then go into your BIOS, and change the Advanced --> Charger Behavior setting to "Disabled". The battery will now no longer charge when you have the laptop plugged in to the AC adapter. When you are travelling and need to use your laptop on battery, just change this BIOS setting again, charge your battery up to 100%, and use your laptop. When you are done travelling, discharge back down to 40%, and change the BIOS setting.

 

Cool ! Thanks a lot for the reply

 

@kent1146
How about maximizing the use of the battery with the least amount wear?

Should users only plug the battery at 10%-20% charge and avoid draining it completely. Is this true?

 

You are correct. Full deep discharges of LiIon batteries put more wear on them. LiIon batteries do not have the "memory" problem of NiCad or NiMH batteries, so partial recharges are definitely the way to go in most cases.

Occasionally (about 1 out of 30 discharges), you should intentionally do a full discharge. This helps to properly calibrate the sensors in the battery and your laptop. Otherwise, the sensors lose their ability to properly sense when a battery is full or empty, which leads to decreased usable charge in the battery.

 

just wondering if any are disabling their charging in bios? does it help battery life? Is it better to remove the whole battery if its going to be used mostly attached to AC?

 

When the battery is fully charged, the computer runs off of a/c. The battery is not involved in the least.

This has been covered in other threads.

 

It does not improve battery life at all. What it does is slow down the degradation of the battery life over time.

If you were to leave your laptop plugged in to AC all the time with the battery in your laptop, then your battery capacity would gradually drop down to about 50% of its current capacity after about 1.5 - 2.0 years. In normal laptops, you can delay this effect by removing the battery and not keeping it in your laptop all the time.

Since the M11x does not have an easily removeable battery, the next best thing is to disable charging in the BIOS until only when you need to charge the battery. It will delay the effect of decreased battery capacity over time.
Removing the entire better, but it is up to you whether the hassle is worth the inconvenience of not having a battery in your laptop. For me, it is not worth the hassle - I simply disable charging via the BIOS, and re-enable it when I need it.

 

I always keep my battery charging and keep my laptops around 2 years, never having the battery drop anywhere close to 50% of capacity. It's true it lowers capacity, but that number is high, at least in my experience.