dummy's guide to li-ion maintenance

forget which thread, but read a long one (maybe a sticky) in re battery maintenance the other day. think i comprehended about 40% of it , and retained much less.

but GENERALLY speaking--if my laptop is my daily driver, ~6hrs/day on average, should i keep it plugged in all the time? i've been so anal about following the ill informed leave-plugged-in-till-100%-then-unplug-till-5%-or-less method. and as many times as i've thought about it, i suppose i've never researched how the charging process works. (i.e. when the li-ion is fully charged, does it stop taking juice from the AC?) not like windows allows me to drop below 5% (which i think i gleaned from the thread isn't actually 5%), so it rarely fully discharges. but what's the deal here? leave plugged in whenever i'm within outlet range? or was i ill informed but still sort of doing the right thing? long-term storage is obviously not a factor here which was a major theme of the thread, and now i'm confused.

 

Don't run on battery if you don't need to. Keep battery and AC plugged in when you can.

Supposedly, you can only run the battery down and re charge it about 500 times.

 

This might be the thread you were thinking of: http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...et-upgrades/91846-notebook-battery-guide.html

You don't need to deep-cycle a Li-ion battery to 5% or lower, and that actually is bad for lithium ion batteries, unless you are trying to recalibrate (which should not be done too often).

 

*celine dion voice* it's all coming back to me now.

thanks! both rep'd.

 

A lot of Lithium Ion batteries advertise x amount of battery wear after y recharges, and I feel like it's often something like 20% after 1500 charges. I'm probably around 400 charges in nearly two years on my Envy 14's slice battery and it's around 85% of its original capacity. Interestingly, the internal battery has only gotten about half the wear of the slice and its at about the same wear level.

As far as I understand, modern laptops (and other rechargeable battery-powered systems) have intelligent charging that stops feeding electricity into a full battery, and a plugged-in laptop takes electricity directly from the adapter, bypassing the battery except for charging purposes, meaning there's no benefit, re: battery maintenance, of unplugging while you're using the system.

 

The number I recall is ~500 cycles 'till it's down to 50% capacity. Shorter cycles are better to reduce wear.

Not sure if I was unclear, but the message I intended was: Keep both battery and AC plugged in when you can.

 

Probably closer to 500 and 50% than 1500 and 80%, but I feel like I've seen quite a few notebooks advertise such claims for their battery's durability.