Question on battery use/strategy

Hey all,

I'm wondering how my laptop use affects battery life. I like to use standby when going between school and home, and usually I'll just plug back in. Should I avoid doing this, as a 1-2% drain followed by recharge eats up a charge cycle? Maybe a better alternative is to use the battery until 20% or so, recharge, then unplug, but I'd prefer to stay plugged since I'd be using the dedicated GPU.

If I go to shutting down the laptop instead, do multiple power off/on cycles in a day adversely affect the notebook in any way?

 

I have my notebook plugged in for over 3 years and the battery would always slightly depleted to about 97% and the charging would kick in.

Still don't see a noticeable difference in battery life(did a quick test when I recently upgraded the HDD) comparing to when it was new.

So I would say use just sleep(i.e. standby) unless you expect it to be not using for quite a while then just suspend it. There is no reason to shutdown it and boot again.

 

With current notebook tech, you can keep your notebook plugged in all the time with the battery and have little to no effects on battery longevity. I prefer to use my battery as a UPS in case I'm working on something and the power is cut.

 

1-2% drain followed by a recharge is not a charge cycle. As lithium-ion batteries have no memory effect, a charge cycle is a full discharge-recharge, whether it's split up over 1 100% discharge/charge, 2 50% discharge/charge, 4 25% discharge/charges, 1 60% discharge/charge + 1 40% discharge/charge, or any other combination (that adds up to 100%). The issue with small discharges and charges is that enough of them over time can throw off the gauge in the battery that measures how much charge is in the battery; which is why it is recommended that people that use their battery the way you do recalibrate it by doing a full discharge and immediate full recharge every few months.

Also, due to the chemistry of lithium-ion, keeping a battery at full as opposed to half-full will theoretically negatively impact your battery life to some extent, but there are no hard numbers on this, partly due to the fact that there are so many other variables that affect this, and a lot depends on the design of your specific notebook and temperatures. Even so, we're probably talking about something like an extra month or two over the course of 2 or 3 years... in my opinion it's probably not worth worrying over.

Again, multiple on/off cycles in theory will reduce the life of your notebook due to thermal stress. In practice, unless there is some issue like the defective solder in the NVidia graphics cards from a few years back, you're talking about reducing a decades-plus lifetime to maybe a few decades... at which point you're probably looking at getting a new notebook anyway.

 

Great answers, all. Thanks.

My last notebook (hp dv2000, bought in early 2007) seemed to worsen in battery life during the first few months I had it. I thought it might have been due to this behavior (I still did the full discharge/charge every few weeks).

 

It's possible. It's also possible that it would have occurred even with alternate behaviour. That's part of what makes this so hard to test, due to individual variances with model (and sometimes even specific battery!), it's very difficult to tell if changing your habits would have made a substantial difference.

 

i keep my battery in my G73.. hp batteries seem to be crap.. my Dv6 ones had 60%+ wear in 6 months.. luckily i had a spare battery!

Panther214