how can i cancell charging when on ac adaptor

hello all, i am very new to the notebook pc world (i have been using desktop for 5 years), i am new to this site also........i have recently got my dell inspiron 1420 (c2duo t8300,2.4 ghz, 3mb l2 cache, 3 gb of ram, 128mb nvidia 8400m gs,win vista home premium 32 bit), as usual it uses lithium ion batteries (mine 6 in numbers). i usually dont use the laptop on batteries except for the power failure.........and sometimes in the office or some other places (for very short period of time). now as the batteries are lithium ion they will loose their performance more with frequent charges, in other way it is said that the litium ion batteries have got their life span of say xxxx number of charge cycle. for this reason and as i dont use the batteries that much i want to reduce the exposures of the batteries to charging for a better lifespan. somewhere i heard that many models of Dell just offer the option not allowing charging when on the ac adaptor.......but i couldnt find it on my laptop. anything in this regard from yuo will be appreciated. and another thing............i used to 5-6 partitions of the HDD when was in destop.......buy here i can see the inspiron has offered me only 2 partitions c drive(OS, all gb except 10gb for the D the recovery disk). now how much it will reduce the performance?.......do i really need partitions? if yes, is there any way without reiinsalling the vista?

 

just take out the battery if you really don't want to charge it... my laptop is plugged in 24/7 except for when i bring it to class. I've had it 6 months and still get the same battery life.

 

Lithium ion batteries do not loose much of their performance based on the number of times you charge them. They are more affected by their lifespan. They begin to degrade from the day they are manufactured, so not using it because you are plugged into an outlet will not really increase their lifespan.

You don't need the recovery partition unless you want to restore the laptop to its out of box state at some point in the future. There is no performance gain from having multiple partitions.

 

Partitioning your hard drive will not increase performance, as cjcerny said.

However, keeping your C on a small partition for itself will keep consistency on that drive, which can save you some trouble in the future. I would not, though, go past 2 partitions. Just not necessary, imo, unless you want an extra for your recovery (and even then you shouldn't put your recovery files on the same hard drive).

 

If you want to keep your HDD running fast, do not let it get much past 50% full. Most drives have a performance curve that support this notion I would argue.

As for the battery, I have had my laptop for 5 months so far, and I still seem to get out of it what I did when I bought it. I am usually plugged in. I like the idea of having it in there so that a power outage may not disrupt my work. I expect the battery to degrade, just hopefully not much for another year or two.