Battery life and external monitor use

Question about battery charging:
I use my Latitude E6530 as a desktop. I selected Primary AC use in Dell's Battery Information utility to try and get the longest life from my 9 cell battery, and Power Options in Control Panel are set to balanced. When I was looking at the info from CPUID HWMonitor, it showed the battery was charged to 108%, and battery wear level at 9%. Is 108% charge shortening the lifespan of my battery? Does 9% wear sound normal for a system approximately 8 1/2 months old? For those of you familiar with it, is CPUID HWMonitor's assessments of my laptop's vital signs usually accurate enough to be this anal about all this? Dell's Battery Info utility says battery health is "Excellent"

Question about an external monitor:
I started using a Dell Ultrasharp U2311, hooked up via HDMI, and set to 1920x1080 on the laptop. The unit does have the NVIDIA dedicated graphics, but is this size large a monitor hard on the computer to run for extended periods of time?
Thanks!

 

when doing demanding things its always best to have it plugged in and running on high performance.

to get a better reading on the battery you could try battery care in my signature below.

 

Use the laptop on battery and drain down to about 10% left (slow drain, don't game or anything), then plug in for a full recharge and it should be calibrated and give you a more accurate reading on the battery life and capacity. BatteryBar and BatteryCare are both great programs that give more detailed info on your laptop's battery.

The charged capacity is just an indication of amount over the rated capacity, it's not unusual to have it over the rated capacity, although 108% with 9% wear is pretty high, that would have made it 117% over rated capacity with no wear. I'm thinking the rated capacity is being read or reported wrong.

 

Thanks Wing nut,
I do unplug it and let it drain down every once in a while. I'll try that again and see what the levels look like again.

 

It's best to not cycle it deliberately often as a batteries life is usually measured in charge/discharge cycles. That long with temperature variations are the primary concerns.

 

I've probably only cycled the battery like that 4 times since it was new, around 9 months.
The temps strike me as a little high too. Replies to my other post on core temps suggested cleaning out fan/vents, which I will do tonight, but wonder about whether the external monitor is pulling too much? Would setting it to Performance in power settings help? It is running the NVIDIA GPU most of the time as far as I have noticed.