Battery Wear..........

Hi guys!
i was just wondering what 'Battery wear' is..................because the battery section in Notebook Hardware Control is showing 8% battery wear....................

oh...and another question popped up......whats HardDrive Spindown in NHC???

 

It is recommended that you drain your battery once every other week. I'm guessing that this is a software that drains the battery faster.

 

how do you drain a battery?

 

by using it until the machine shuts off - you can play a dvd and set your screen to full brightness and lower the setting to shutoff to 1%

 

thanks guys!......so that will lower the wear level?

 

why is it recommended to drain the battery once a week? I thought with every drain and recharge the durability of the battery decreases...

 

as I understand 'battery wear' in notebook control is how much your battery is dead. IMO notebook control calculates this by measuring the highest current possible charge level and compairing it to manufacturer defined max charge level.
lets say manufacturer defined 4800mAh and my battery can only hold 4720mAh, so my wear level would be ~2%.
if you don't use battery very often, then it is best to charge it to aprox. 90% [EDIT: must be to aprox. 20-50%], take out and place it in your drawer.
in other case it is recommended to do full recharge every 1-2 weeks. [EDIT: only needed for recalibration, read my second post]
these procedures helps you to prolong your battery life, thus keeping your battery wear level as low as possible.

anyways after 3-5yrs your battery will be dead

P.S. of course battery wear may be measured in other ways - for example by measuring discharge rate or voltage... ?

 

thankx martynas! btw...you have a quanta too! man these computers rock! only your is the MW1A...which is more expensive than the KN1...and has a better screen!

 

Martynas is right about the wear level showing the portion of the battery with cells failing in one way or another. About the storage of the battery, there are quite a few theories but here's the most common IMO (chinna_n's post).
I drain my battery once a month. Draining does not help with the wear level at all but calibrates the battery so that when the taskbar shows 90% remaining, you know it is really 90%.

Hard drive spindown is an option which allows to save some power while the HDD is not in use by turning it off(windows powermanagement has it, too). Yet, through the virtue of virtual memory our HDDs are always in some use so this is practically unusable.

 

thanks alot Vassil...and everybody who replied!!

 

actually you should read http://www.batteryuniversity.com/partone-21.htm

 

hmf in that page there is different recommendations as were in my HP OmniBook 6100 manual. I had HP OmniBook 6100 for at least 4 yrs and HP recommended to DO full discharge every 2 or so weeks. After 4 yrs of use lithium-ion battery still lasted ~2hrs...

EDIT: well I have read that manual again so I must apologize, but Actino was right full recharge-discharge is recommended by HP once in a month and is needed only to display battery life correctly (recalibration).

Here is copy-paste from manual:

 

I dont use my battery very often, so what should i do? I just tend to keep it in even with ACon all the time but i doubt thats good for it. My options are:

Weekly charge/discharge cycles to keep it calibrated?

or

Charge to 100%, use untill 50% then store untill needed?

 

Personaly I store my battery...

 

The downside of storing you battery is that you have to be very careful when moving the laptop. For example I move it from the desk to the bed and if I accidentaly pull it harder so that the power cord disconnects, the laptops goes off and I lose any info. It has happend twice and on the second time I reinserted my battery.