How to save battery without removing it?

Hi, my laptop is plugged in constantly so I've gotten into the habit of removing my battery to prevent it from being prematurely worn down. Unfortunately I have a model where the battery is a hassle to constantly remove so I was wondering if there was an easier way to prevent the battery from constantly charging up when plugged in. Perhaps a software way that could be switched on and off.

 

This is the wrong subforum for this question, but there is no need to remove your battery. It should only charge to capacity, then the charging stops until it needs to be topped up. The things that really wear the battery are excessive heat or cold, excessive loads, deep discharge especially for prolonged periods, and just too many charge discharge cycles. Unless you have a particularly toasty laptop, removing the battery won't help.

 

Keeping a lithium battery charged to the max (rated safe max) is not as damaging as draining it dry, but keeping it somewhere near the middle and not used is indeed better. As for software control, there's no standard interface for that, and most systems don't support such a function. Which laptop are you using?

 

so the battery doesn't drain any more than it would if it was removed if it is in the computer when it was plugged in? I was told that the battery keeps getting drained and recharged in a laptop when plugged in which causes it to wear down quicker. And that the overcharging causes its life to go down too.

 

It kind of does, but far slower than what would happen without stable AC.

Batteries do self-discharge when not loaded. If you keep the battery in with AC connected, eventually the charge would drop below a level where the controller decides to recharge it. (This is also bad for calibration in the long run.)

Depending on the chemical nature of the cell, frequent short cycles charge/discharge can cause the material to crystallize in bad ways and wear out the battery faster. Modern Li-ion batteries are relatively good and handling this, but "clean" long cycles that don't flip the direction of current in the middle are still better.


To make matters worse, some laptop PSUs don't have enough muscle to handle the machine under maximum load. When the system is loaded it will "steal" power from the battery even with stable AC. When load drops the battery gets charged again.