T400 battery questions

My T400 is coming soon (hopefully sometime next week ) and I'm unsure about the battery...I've read about the power management battery threshold thing in T400 and it sounds interesting
What exactly should I do to the battery when it arrives? Charge it full and discharge it to 40%?
Or keep it plugged in and use power management to keep it charged at 40%?
Or charge (first charge) it to 40% and keep it somewhere cool?
I don't want to do the same mistake again like what I did to my old laptop...(charged full then store >_>)
Thanks in advance

 

the 40% thing is only if you want to store it for a long period of time.

there's no real secret on how make it last long; so don't worry about when you first get it.

i would say avoid...
+charging it to 100%
+charging while using it
+using battery while on your desk (near the AC, presumably)
+draining the battery to 0%
+putting it in the freezer
+etc....

 

somewhere around 40-90 ish percent should be fine.

 

I see...thanks for the info
What about the initial charge? Is there any special trick to that?

 

just charge it to 100% and then run it all the way down, assuming you mean the very first charge of the battery.

 

why? there's no point to that...

 

well for one, it wouldnt hurt. Second you need to think about how long that battery has been sitting there without a cycle, batteries (well lithium-ion ones at least) need to be cycled at least once a month.

 

I never have the battery in my machine when it's in the dock running on AC. Not sure if that makes any difference but I figured the computer heat combined with the constant recharging (even tho I have threashold set to 85%) is worse than simply letting it sit unused for a few weeks.

Sucks because it means I have to run a UPS (computer battery would normally be my UPS).

Just curious -- how far do you run the battery down before shutting down? I'm at 20% for first alarm and 10% shutdown, which is as far as I want to push it.

 

2% usually
ive gone to 0%, and it recharged fine (actually even better)

 

If you're using the charge thresholds it isn't going to charge the battery. Unless you're tucking into a dark corner it isn't going to heat up the battery much past ambient either. Just leaving it in place is fine. Mine's been sitting on AC all day at 54% since I used it on battery in other rooms a while over the last two or three days. The battery feels slightly cool to the touch (6cell); it's been on my desk on and running most of the day, albeit not with the dock, so there's been less clearance under the part that sticks out.

For what its worth, I set my thresholds to 40% & 96%. My T400 is almost a year old. Power Manager shows it as 55.94Wh (design capacity 56.16Wh) with 53 cycles on it. I haven't done a calibration or battery reset in a while though so I'll probably do one in the next day or so.

 

Thanks you guys for being so informative!
Can't wait for it to arrive