battery calibration queston

i'm draining my battery as i type this to calibrate it. is it necessary to do this for bran new batteries? and in every guide i've read, it says to disable sleep/hibernation so the battery can drain and "automatically" shut off the computer.

does this mean that the battery reaches zero and the notebook just suddenly unsafely shuts off (like yanking the power cord off a desktop)? or does the battery have some circuits in there that properly and safely shuts off the notebook like you would do with the "start" > "shut down" button?

 

If you empty it and are able to disable low/critical battery actions (you can't in Win7) then it will just "crash".

 

yes i'm using win7, but i change the power options to never sleep/hibernate. at critical level, i lowered it from 5% to 3%. would it work as fully drained if i lowered the critical level to 0%?

so calibrating means you run it down until it crashes right? or just run down until windows automatically safely shuts it down?

 

you don't need to calibrate new batteries... only do so a few months later when your wear level increases...use CPUID hardware monitor to check your battery wear every few days/weeks... when it's 10% plus , then calibrate... and when ur battery's over in calibration , the laptops shutts off like when the power cord is pulled out...

 

Until it "crashes", something you can't do in Win7.

So the solution is to restart and enter the BIOS after Windows7 decided to shut down and let it sit in the BIOS until it turns off.

 

Wear shouldn't be "repaired" by callibration... so I'm not sure why you'd do it? ...

Some people say a full cycle increases life still... others say it doesn't...

I personally just use the device...

 

the reason why i wanted to calibrate is because i didn't think something was right with this battery. it's a 4400mAh capacity battery, but CPUID hardware monitor and batterybar software reports it as 4730mAh capacity. right now, full charge is 4724mAh, so wear is (almost) zero right now. does that seem right? how can the reported capacity be over the rated capacity?

 

I agree with DetlevCM.

Full discharge of Li-Ion batteries are said to be bad for them. I've only deep discharged my battery twice in the 8 months I've had it (and it was because I needed all 4 hours of runtime on those days.) After one deep discharge, I noticed that the battery wear went from 4% before to 6%.

 

You are right about the point that deep discharges are bad for Lithium Ion batteries.

But when you reach "0%" they aren't completely empty... they only discharge until a certain threshold anyway...

 

ok, they were discharged until win7 automatically shut it off. they're fully charged, and powered on again and i took the screenshot, but it makes no sense to me.

theoretically, all 3 numbers should be the same at 4400mAh, which is what's printed on the battery label. however, the designamted capacity is 47300mWh, which is over what it's suppose to be. but then the full charge capacity is even higher than the designated capacity. after it's 100% charged, the current capacity is about 3.5% lower than the full charge capacity. can someone explain this or if i have battery wear or not?

 

Maybe it's just a wrong reading in HWmonitor, try another app....batterybar is great. And you can put in in your taskbar very nicely