Charging the battery for the first time.

I've heard to get the full length of your batteries potential, when you first get a new battery you should charge it to capacity, then run like a CD or something constant until it is out of juice. Then Charge it up all the way again and run it down one more time. After that you can charge it to full and you should get the longest battery life.

Anyone know if this is true, or if charging it up full the first time is all that is needed?

 

that's a good way to kill your lithium-ion battery! When you first get your laptop, it should be around 43% charge, which is ideal charge for a LI-On battery in storage. So you should charge it before using it. At that point u will have the maximum charge and logevity. From then on, each time you use the battery, you're getting less and less life from it. To make it last longer, charge it whenever you can... lithium ions hate being discharged; infact a full discharge will damage the battery. There's plenty of site with information on this. I read most of this from accredeted research. It paid off well; my last notebook lost 20% of it's charge in a year, which is really good considering I used it at university every day on battery for 2 - 7 hours (many, many cycles).

 

flaxx,

I think you're being a little overzelous in your response. Yes, repeated full discharges are not a great thing for a lithium ion, but all the same we're not talking about a _full_ discharge here. The circuitry in the battery protects it from such an occurence. Try as you might, you won't get them below a few percent remaining charge. I was able to increase capacity about 3% after a few back to back charge/discharge cycles, it's held steady since.

 

ArchMaster,

I used this little utility called BatteryEater Pro to run my machine down and instrument the results.

http://www.benchmarkhq.ru/english.html?/bepro_e.html

It works great, you can see what your initial capacity is and how it changes after each discharge cycle. Just remember to disable any screen savers and turn off options to sleep/hibernate at low power.

 

Thanks for all the info guys

 

that has nothing to do with your lithium ion battery capacity and everything to do with your digital gauge. that's called a calibration. if you repeatitly charge your battery without cycling it, the digital guage can get inaccurate -- if you time your battery life, it still lasts the same amount of time. You're right about the circuitry not allowing you to completly discharge the battery (i was just making a point), but full cycling a lithium ion (or lead acid) battery is NOT good for the battery and decreases the life of the battery.

 

Calibration, sure, but mine literally reports nearly 4 watts in extra capacity. It reports the discharge rate all the same. This would point to giving extra runtime - at least when using the OS auto standby/hibernate settings? Regardless there is benefit to doing this. The guy asked if he should cycle his battery a couple times and you reponded "that's a good way to kill your lithium-ion battery" which is a bit silly.

FWIW, if you use an OD bay you have no choice in the matter on the operation of the OD battery - it discharges almost completely (reads 4-5%) before the main kicks in. So if this was really such a heady issue Asus is blowing it here. From what I understand the thing that really taxes lions are high temps - at 100 % charge the internal temps are high, and of course the components in your machine are cooking when plugged in, so it's best to store the batteries at moderate charge in the fridge if you're not using them. I'm not saying running a battery completely down does no harm, can't imagine a low voltage/high current situation being terribly good for it, just that folks might be overblowing the severity of doing so.

 

Well you're entitled to your own opinion. I have read papers and formal tests so I'm giving you tested knowledge, not just "silly" comments. If these were NiCD, then you would want to cycle them, but not Lithium Ion. As for laptops with two batteries: most laptops use both batteries at the same time - if Asus drains one battery at a time as you claim it does, then that is Asus' problem -- it doesn't mean they're right. Besides, the more batteries you go through, the more money they get from you; so be warry of thinking companies have your best interest at heart -- they have their own best interest at heart, that's why they grow to multi million/billion dollar companies.

As for the whole temperature at 100% charge - you are right about that. And once again, you are reading digital guages on reported wattage and/or estimated remaining time. I'm talking simple chemistry - lithium ion batteries don't need to be cycled and infact full cycling them shortens their life time.