Teach me how to use a notebook battery, I keep killing mine.

Hi,

I just got my GT627, with 0% battery wear. After only using it for 3 hours it's at 5% wear. All I did was charge it t 100% then use it till it was at 2%, then charge it back up.

My old toshiba tecra had two batteries. After 1 year use, one battery has 50% wear and the other after only 7 months has 83% wear.

So I don't know what to do

Calibration did not help my old batteries at all.

I bought the MSI GT627 here on NBR, it was use for a few months. I got it with 0% wear and in a few hours it's up to 5%

It's 30C here, maybe that is partially to blame, but I must be doing something wrong.

So at what level should I start and stop charging?

EDIT: Should I just take the battery out and only use it when I really need to?

 

In my first laptop I had the same issue and since then I'm taking the battery out. I don't use it anyway. I just needed the portability from A to B. Probably the battery is bad quality.

 

Ha! If you take out the battery, make sure to store it properly.*

I took out a battery for my Inspiron 4100 (2001/2) when I first got it and a couple of months later the battery was completely dead.

Funny this, though. My current laptop is dated October 2008 and battery wear is 20.5%. XD

 

Ok. I've charged it to 40% and put it away.

I just wonder how the guy who sold me the notebook managed to keep it so well?

 

Never touched it at all?

By the way, my current laptop dated Oct 08 has battery wear 20.5% and I've used the battery the whole time (except when it was out to service center for about 6 weeks - bad memories), even sometimes to the point where the computer hard shuts down because the battery is drained to the point where it just can't power the laptop anymore.

 

I don't understand how you manage that, we live in the same hot country...

So do you charge to 100% or less?

 

No power management utilities installed, so it generally charges right up to 100%. I sometimes stop it at 95%, because 95% -> 100% takes about half an hour.

 

I take mine out since most of the time the notebook is on desk
.. that and I can't afford to have another dying-battery
my previous Thinkpad T22 only lasted for ~15 minutes ..as the result of battery + AC always plugged-in

Oh and one time I tried to calibrate my current, leaving it in BIOS until it shutdown itself and charge it back full, I made my battery wear became worse LOL ..after that I promised myself will never do that again haha

 

How do you check how much wear the battery has? If it was used for months and has zero wear but then jumps to 5% after one cycle, I suspect the utility might be confused.

 

You can use a program like BatteryBar or Everest or even HWMonitor now. Compare battery design capacity with full charge capacity.

 

Or you can do this....

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5830539&postcount=28

 

It can happen

The first time I used my current notebook on battery, a few days after purchase and checked wear it said 30%.

After a few complete discharge cycles however it went back to 1%

I'm in a hot country too, and use my battery alot often to shut down point as well, but after a year and 5 months my wear is currently at 21%

Either the battery is of extremely low quality, or the sensor is messed up

Use a number of complete discharges and 2/3 programs to verify the value

 

Batteries with built in SMART technology are good, but you only get those ones with more premium laptops like ThinkPads, because then you can control at what point the battery charges at or stops at, most laptop batteries i know of don't have this.

 

Interesting. I get this:

I've tried measuring the battery life empirically: I have a relatively long weekly meeting (around 1.5 hours) to which I usually don't bother bringing the charger and I time how long the meter takes to drop to different percentages. It's generally the same amount of time each week, so I assumed that the battery is still good, but I don't understand how it could be at exactly design capacity. Keep in mind that this laptop will be exactly two years old in 3 weeks and I've only taken the battery out when I was cleaning the machine (it usually runs on AC power, but I sometimes take it to meetings).

 

You can also check the battery with Everest, but I believe it reports the same thing, from the same source.

Do you have something like Smartcharger? Keeping the battery always between 50 and 95%(I think) keeps the battery healthy longer.

 

I keep mine on 80% and Battery Bar shows 0% wear after a year. Maybe I should check with another app to be sure though.

 

I have no idea how it manages the battery. The laptop is a JFL92 (very similar to the one in your sig) and it comes with Compal's Smart Battery, but I've always set it to keep the battery fully charged (that's how it came with the pre-installed Vista and that's what it was by default when I upgraded to Win 7) so I don't know if it is actually doing anything.

I suspect some batteries are simply much better than others and user behavior only changes things by a little bit.

 

Oh, well that's what I meant, Smart Battery, it's just that I forgot it's true name as I don't use it. What it does is keeps the battery in one range of percent BC when the battery level drops to somewhere around 30-50% it looses one cycle. Well lets say the battery has 1000 cycles, math is pretty simple... Now that's a good quality battery I guess, 3 years is OK. If the battery is bad, then it has less cycles. That's what I know about batteries. I might be wrong, but I'm not.

I'll check with my battery as well just out of curiosity.