Dangers Of Emptying The Battery??

Hey im new here so bear with me. Im going to try an make this as detailed as possible. I have an acer aspire V3 771 with a 6 cell liion battery and I just bought it 3 days ago. I was gaming on it today and didnt realize how much juice was being used. It eventually ran out and the screen went black. Just this day my friend warned me not to let the battery die completely but the computer did not warn me on screen that it was low. Anyways while the screen was off I could still here something coming from the laptop. I got worried and plugged it in fearing the worst -whatever that may be, I have no idea - and I noticed that the power button was not lit up and would not light up when I pressed it. about 20 secs later the laptop stopped all small noises and after 5 secs It turned on. It then came to a screen that told me that everything I was doing was saved to the HD and asked me to start windows normally, so i did. everything seems fine and my stuff is still there, but I am mostly wondering about the battery.
When I first got the laptop I plugged it in before I booted 'er up. Then while it was charging I set everything up on screen. apparently your supposed to let it charge for 24 hours before turning it on??? I had no idea of this. anyways it seemed to be working fine.
So this is where I start asking the questions. Im hoping that my feedback has given you a detailed description of what happened and hopefully you can give me some advice.

Will my battery be noticeably affected by getting critically low?

Is letting the battery completely run out really really bad?

When It turned on again I noticed that the battery was already at 7% and it had only been plugged in for 1 min, so my question here is did my computer go into hibernation at 5% battery and not completely run out? if so, by not getting to 0%, will my battery be perfectly fine?

Should I leave my charger in for a long time to kind of get the 'battery memory'? If so, can I use my laptop if I leave it plugged in or is it best to let it sit for a while?

and any other tips to improve battery life/performance that you think I should know?

Thanks for any advice and responses, sorry for the long read, but I wanted you to have a detailed perspective on what happened.

 

Windows automatically will hibernate (by default) or shutdown (user defined) at 5% battery life left so you are safe. It's ok to drain the battery to 5% periodically, and isn't a bad idea for calibration of the battery. I believe there is even a failsafe in batteries where 0% (in Windows) is not truly 0%, it still has some capacity so as not to ruin it, but I have no evidence to this front. It is not good to drain it completely as it can ruin the cells, but sometimes it's necessary to get life out of the battery, but I wouldn't do it unless you have some funky things happening to your battery as a last ditch effort. You can do that by draining your battery (and preferably slowly) in Windows to about 10%, reboot your laptop and enter BIOS and let it sit there until it dies. You can leave your battery plugged in while it's on A/C power, no problem there.

Significant things that limit a battery's life are:
- draining the battery quickly, at a rapid rate
- draining the battery at all (that's it's job though)
- high heat, usually laptops are designed so the heat from the laptop don't really affect the battery, I'd be more worried about leaving the laptop in a hot car than in a hot laptop used for gaming

Otherwise, just use it as you want.

 

Thanks alot.

 

There are built-in safeguards to prevent damage to the battery. Running it down isn't necessarily bad but as noted, the life of the battery will be extended if you do not do that. The battery has a limited number of charge/recharge cycles - kind of like how the lifespan of mammals is measured in heartbeats (ok, semi-morbid example).
At the end of the day it is a battery - something that can be replaced. You presumably bought the notebook to use, not to mold your usage habits to.

Not that related to the battery issue - something you should absolutely not do is unplug the power adapter from the wall while it is still plugged into the notebook.

 

Do you mean do not unplug the charger at all even when its at 100%? or should I just unplug it before I turn it on and after I turn it off?

 

I'm pretty sure Charles means unplug the charger from the notebook first then unplug from the wall no matter the situation.

 

Modern batteries have circuitry in them that 'guesses' where the current charge level is relative to the max the battery will safely hold. If you never let your battery drain very low (<10%) or fully charge, that circuitry is quite likely going to be wrong most of the time.

It's actually good practice to let your battery drain fully and then do a full charge right after in order to 'train' the circuitry to the batteries max safe level. Everyone has different recommendations on how often this should be done, but I would say at least once every couple months.

Something interesting but slightly off topic: when a battery is at 100%, it isn't actually fully charged - that is only as high as it can go safely. There's safety cut offs that prevent this, but you could charge a battery up until the point it explodes or fails in some other spectacular way. Not too long ago (like, a couple decades sort of thing) before these safeties were implemented, you had to unplug the charger yourself at 100% or risk it catching fire!