Battery Question

Is it bad if i keep the battery in my laptop when its plugged in AC? Because i was told that the battery can die very fast if i leave it inside the laptop when im running on the AC power.

Thanks

 

It doesn't hurt the newer lithium Ion (read past 4+ years). There is circuitry in place in the battery to prevent overcharging from being left in the computer.

The battery in my 1520 has been left in the laptop for 2 years now and it still has 90% of capacity.

 

Li-on batteries do not trickle charge. What happens is that there is a level built in which will say "do not charge me unless I am below x% full". This is normally 95%, so until your battery is at this level it will not charge. End of.

When your laptop is on AC power, it is running your notebook. It is not charging the battery which is then running the notebook.

Now whilst you will not do any damage to your battery in relation to trickle charging, you are keeping the battery next to a lot of hot components (i.e. your laptop). Li-on batteries do not like the heat. This is what can cause them to have a shortened lifespan. It will not kill your battery very quickly at all, but will slowly degrade the effectiveness of the chemical composition inside. This is also why many people remove their batteries when on AC power.

There is an argument against this though. What if there is a power cut? If your battery was still in place, you'd be absolutely fine; but without it, you've lost whatever you were working on.

Also, with some laptops, removing the battert can expose more of your notebook to the outside world, and all the dust and dirt therein. This does not apply for most laptops, but some it will.

Me personally I leave the battery in place. I've never had less than 3 years out of any battery. I'd always recommend leaving the battery in place.

 

I also leave the battery in place. Li-Ion has come a long way.
I do it for the above mentioned reasons. I don't think my laptop gets hot enough to do any damage either.

 

Agreed with everyone else. There is really nothing wrong with leaving the battery inside, and in fact it's a good idea since you have a backup power source in the event of a power failure.

Imagine you're updating your BIOS with the AC in but not the battery, and a tree falls, snapping your neighborhood's power line. Your laptop loses all power and shuts off, with an incomplete BIOS update. Your motherboard may never boot again.

Granted, modern BIOS update utilities check to make sure that both the battery and AC power are present before letting your run the update, for that exact reason, but the principle is still the same. Reliable backup power > an extra month of battery life after 2 or 3 years.

 

Mine is always left in, I've never had any problems with the battery and it's getting on to three years. I think the small decrease in life is worth not losing what may be rather important things when the battery cuts off. And it's pretty funny hearing swearing from another room, whose occupants take their batteries out, if there is a power outage.

 

Yeah one nice thing about laptops - built in UPS

 

Mine is always plugged in this way! No probs yet.

When I sit outside, it's not plugged in..and I still get great battery life!


Cin

 

Some notebooks come with software that automatically charges the battery to a certain level and let's it drop off to a set threshold before recharging it so that the battery is not constantly being charged and kept at 100% which will shorten battery life.

 

All notebooks that use li-on batteries do this. Which is pretty much all notebooks.

Some notebooks allow you to change the percentage though, typically via the BIOS.

 

Not really, I've used quite a few systems recently which keep the battery topped off at 98-100% which is not good.

 

They all charge to a certain level and let it drop off. Whether it is 98% or 50% is besides the point, they all have this level set. The reason is to prevent overcharging, which Li-on batteries seriously do not like (i.e. they simply do not hold overcharge, so something would go wrong). Also, it doesn't do the battery any more damage to have this either set really high or really low.