Removing Laptop Battery if plugged in?

I got the u45jc Asus laptop and got it because of the good battery life.

Hey guys would you say its better to take off the battery if you have it plugged in? Is it a horrible idea to have it plugged the whole time or should you always take the plug off once the battery hits close to 100 percent?

Also, entertainment mode always as oppose to battery saving mode right?
And should i ever go to battery saving mode? If so, what kind of things should i be doing where i do go to battery saving mode.

Also, how do you turn off the WIFI?

And where do you guys leave the brightness? Do you max it out or put it somewhere in the middle or the lowest?

 

I take my battery out when plugged in. I have also removed it with the laptop running and have never had an issue. I find it does extend the life of the battery. To turn off wifi on my Acer you hit CRTL+F3. On the U45JC there should be a similar button combo you can press, a switch on the side, or you can do it from within Windows.

 

do notice that the battery power sub system means you have a UPS which IMO is much more important than the supposed to be benefit of preserving battery life(which I think only is measurable in lab).

I have my batteries in all the time for my notebooks(almost 24/7 for 3+ years) and I haven't noticed any drop in life. That is in sharp contrast with my colleague's machine(exact same model at work) where he only plug in when the battery is almost empty.

In other words, the actual draw down then recharge cycle determines the life, not the supposed to be 'optimal temperature'(may have some effect but not human measureable in my case).

 

if its running and you pull out battery make sure that its not under a heavy load. My laptop will crash if i pull out battery while gaming/stress test/encoding movies. You don't need to remove the battery unless your battery gets hot. If you touch it and it feels like a hot car in the sun light remove it ^^. Also if you store it make sure its at 40% capacity. But you only need to do that if you are not going to use it for a month or longer. I wouldn't bother reemoving the battery unless you plan on keeping it on AC for more tthan a week. It causes very little damage. I have been doing further research and talking to tech support at a battery reseller and a full charge and partial charge make basically no difference. Your li-ion are rated for 300 full discharges and recharges before they reach 80% capacity. So if you drained it everyday it would still have almost 80% capacity.

 

About the battery talk; i've always practiced to always plug out the power cord from the notebook once the batt. is fully charged.

I've had issues in the past where my batt. life would become abysmal overtime if the power cord was always plugged in; if the main current would go my batt. would not last not even 5mins. Essentially it seems I messed up the batts. chemistry by having it constantly plugged in via AC power. So my rule of thumb is to always remove that power adapter when fully charged.

But pulling the battery all together shouldn't pose a problem; even while powered on.

 

There is no harm of removing your battery. I actually recommend it, as heat will kill battery life so if you are planning on being plugged in for awhile, I would remove the battery. Now be careful as if your AC adapter gets unplugged then your laptop instantly powers off. There are also numerous threads here about taking care of your battery.

As stated above, normally a FN combined with any Fxx key with the Wifi logo will toggle on/off or some laptops have a physical switch (becoming less and less common). You really shouldn't be toggling it that often.

 

Do and don’t battery table

 

According to HP Service its better to take out the battery if you plan on leaving it plugged in for 2 weeks or more, if you plan on going less than that, leave it in

 

I was like your guys several years ago. I had a HP notebook which I used almost exclusively in home and in offices. So I removed the battery and put it in the drawer. After three years my notebook died. You know what, the battery also died because of lack of charging.

By comparison, my wife had a Dell notebook which was designed to mount the battery on when using (due to physical reason). After 5 years the battery life was really bad, say 1 hour. But I could still edit my documents and save them safely before the laptop shut down. Finally the laptop died last month, but the battery was still ok.

You see, my point behind that is:
If you use power adapter most of the time and use the battery only occasionally, most likely you don't need a 6 hour battery life. Before the battery is low, it is very likely you would be able to locate one power outlet. Or if you are frequently on the go and use the battery a lot, why not buy a new one when the original one is dying? It costs only a fractional of the price of the laptop.

It really doesn't make sense to unplug the battery to save it for "possible future use", especially when you are running the risk of power outage and data loss.

So please PLUG the fxxxing battery!

 

This is true. Most laptops have a power consumption of around 0.1W even when powered off (because of some configurations such as wake up by LAN or wake up by USB, etc.). The battery will slowly drains if you don't use it for a long time.

But you'd better mount the battery when you're using the laptop. It is designed to be so. Advanced power management software would allow you to specify when to charge the battery and when to stop charge the battery.

 

They drain a small amount of power because there is a phenomenon that all electronics and devices that use power. If they are plugged in they still drain a small amount of power. 3% of the worlds power is used by devices turned off that are plugged in. This has nothing to do with such settings unless you specifically have those set up. Also i believe sleep uses .1W..it won't even drain that much. You'll loose more power by battery degradation than power leakage. Your point is irrelevant. Li-ions loose about 8% a month of power. That's in the 20C range.

To be honest. If you did a full drain everyday or just left the battery at full power for a year....they would loose the same capacity so there is no reason to even mess with it. Your nearly guaranteed to loose 20ish% in the first year unless you store it at 40% power and recharge it every 3 months or so to 40%

 

@8% per month, 12months = >60% loss in power.

Me too although I'm not a heavy battery user, used more as a backup for power failures which are fairly common especially during electrical storms. I haven't checked on capacity for a long time but could maybe look later on.

 

It is almost one year after I started to use my ThinkPad for school... It gets FULLY discharged almost every week. (1-2 times) I have never unplugged the battery.. It still lasts about 4 hours, same as last year.

 

2 different things.

Li-ion batteries loose "charge" at ~8% a month

li-ion batteries loose "capacity" at about ~20% a year if you leave it plugged in 24/7

So if you drained it 300 times in a year it would still have 80% capacity. If you left it in 24/7 and drained it often you still have about 80% capacity. All I am saying its pointless to be pulling your batteries in and out to save at best 5% capacity....which i doubt you'll save that much. Only reason to pull it out are these:


(1) Your battery gets really hot while plugged in A/C. If it feels like hot water from the sink or like a car in the sun. Basically if its seem pretty hot remove it.

(2) If your not going to use it for at least 2 weeks than remove it at 40% capacity.

(3) not sure what else would be a good reason. Those are the only 2 that come to my mind.

 

A self discharge rate of ~8% a month. That makes a lot more sense, thanks for clearing it up.

Okay, I measured the capacity of my 2 year and a bit 6 cell battery at a near constant load of 25.8W and it works out to about 80% of the manufacturers capacity rating. The battery is left in the laptop just about all the time and the laptop has over 9000 hours of operation run up. Room temp is typically over 30C most of the time so naturally the battery temp is normally a bit higher than that and reaching over 40C+ when used under load. I don't run on battery much at all preferring AC. Don't know if that helps any.

 

google battery bar and install it. its a great program. I am starting to really like it.


EDIT: oh also the 300 charge rating counts that you discharge and recharge at 1C which is the maximum rated discharge and recharge rate. So don't worry about it charging to fast or discharging to fast.

 

I've heard good things about BB but hardly ever really use the battery. I do like to keep an eye on the individual cell volts though as some time ago I had a battery where one of the cells somehow dropped below it's critical voltage and never recovered making the whole pack useless. New cells at the time were hard to find. It's also handy for me to know the load (power draw). The current is displayed negative for discharging and positive for charging.

The 6 cells are 3 series of 2 cells in parallel (pack 1 - 3) .



The test I did before though was in DOS so I could get a pretty constant load, no power saving features or multiple threads to worry about.

 

nice program....can it really tell what each cell has/does? Do you got a link. Also you can easily buy cells from batteryspace.com

 

Each pair of cells, yes. Here you can see the cell voltage of the 3 pairs from 99% to 10% over 80mins. Note at the bottom knee that cell pair 3 drops a fair bit lower than the other 2 pairs. At this point voltage can start to drop quite quickly so I like to stop before that happens. Just a personal preference.



The software is not publicly available so no link, sorry. However Mumak seems to be doing some awesome things with HWinfo32 under the Windows thread and most of the information above I got from the EC so it might be worth nicely asking him if your interested in seeing those sort of things and whether they might be available on your laptop. There are so many different configurations and undocumented features it's understandable that general software tends not to show everything that is happening for every system.

 

I still actualy wonder if the battery care feature works when you set it so it won't charge more than 50%. Right now I did set it to that since it did say to set it to that if you use the AC power the most. If I did use the battery the most then it said to set it to 80%. Do you guys think that it will save battery life by doing this?


Since notebook batteries are expensive I want to take care of it best I can do.

 

Truthfully? Probably, but it also probably won't be enough to notice. It'd be like the difference between your car getting 28 miles per gallon, and 25. It might keep your battery going for an extra couple months.... over 3 or 4 years' time.

 

Add in the inconvenience of not having 20% of the battery power available when you are disconnected, and it becomes even harder to justify.

 

Gah! Another one of these threads. sigh.

Leave your battery in and fuggedaboutit! Don't stress, don't worry. Batteries lose charge over time regardless.

Batteries do not lose 20% a year if plugged in. They lose 20% a year if it is a poorly designed battery or bad circuit.

My battery in my Sager is plugged in 24/7 for nearly 18 months now and has only lost 4% of its charge. I run it on battery only on occasion, have done a full drain purposely twice to calibrate the life remaining, and probably a half dozen full cycles with occasional battery use. Heck my Vostro 1500 going on 3.5 years which I sold to my buddy, has lost less than 20% capacity and is plugged in 90% of the time.

 

They on average loose 20% and thats coming from batteryspace tech as well. He even said that but at best you might save a few percents if you play those stupid battery changing games but its not worth the time as the great htwingnut said.

Is the inconvenience of removing it 5 times a day any more convenient? i doubt it. Or leaving it at 40% change and than having to wait an hour until its charged to use it? comon

 

forget about those lab test and optimal condition, just use the notebook as it is designed.

2 of my notebooks which is plugged in 24/7 for 3+ years still doesn't show significant drop of battery life(80%+ or so).

my another netbook which is 8+ years and have been left to drain to empty(10+ months for multiple times, I only use it when travelling) and still have 50% of the battery life.