Leaving a laptop plugged in

They did, actually. Nice little button in the upper-left corner of the keyboard with VGA printed on it. Normally glows orange to indicate that Optimus is live. Push it, and it turns green to indicate that it's running on the IGP only.

 

Lol, yes....depending on which model. I think ES was referring to his machine, the 8130, which does not have optimus.

Mr. Mysterious

 

Right but Electric Shock is making is sound as if it's horrible to leave your battery plugged in. And in a business environment it's different too, users abuse their laptops and batteries are discharged recharged all the time. I know I used to when I carried a laptop for work, provided by work. Plug in for 20 minutes, unplug, drain to 20%, plug in for 30 minutes at next meeting, drain again, fully charge, take it home sit in my car in 100F heat for hours... If it were my own laptop I'd probably be a bit more careful.

Yes OP needs to decide, but not to be led astray thinking their battery will be dead in a year if it's left in the machine.

 

Lol you guys are way over thinking this battery business.

I'm familiar with Lithum batteries as well was Lithium Phosphate batteries, having used these sorts of batteries in different applications, even high wattage applications (2000 watt hour battery).

Personally I don't have any problems leaving my batteries plugged in trickle charging even on the worst circuits, as long as I regularly discharge the battery and recharge it every month or so it tends to maintain the longevity of the battery.

That whole 50% battery capacity deal is nonsense, because really what you want to do is discharge the battery to around 7% if you want to do a full charge cycle, laptop batteries are made up of many cells and discharging it to 50% might only make it so that your cells are more unevenly charged. You can have 6 cells and maybe 5 out of 6 are sitting at 50% while one is still 75% capacity. You want to drain the battery to atleast 10% so that you force all the cells to discharge properly otherwise you end up with uneven voltages throughout your battery.

Sure you can take the battery out of your laptop, however from what I understand the battery helps regulate the voltage that is going into your laptop. When you operate plugged in power only and no battery now you have no battery that can absorb the voltage jumps/drops before it powers your components. I believe that is worse and will cause more damage to your laptop then anything else, is having bad voltage feed your cpu/gpu chips and the like, batteries can take quite a good amount of abuse and will generally output cleaner power.

If you don't follow a regular discharge cycle (minimum once a month) I believe that will cause the most damage to your battery, and unplugging your battery from the laptop will cause more damage to your laptop's components as there is nothing to regulate the voltage.

Remember that your laptop battery isn't one battery, its typically composed of 4-6 batteries if not more, that are all wired together in a series in order to create higher voltages, if you don't properly discharge it regularly that will cause the most damage.

Also, the way batteries are measured, 0% isn't actually 0%, because if the battery was actually drained to 0% your battery would die and no longer take a charge ever again, manufacturers typically have circuits built in on the batteries themselves that will lock out the battery when the capacity drops in order to protect the battery. However as a general rule I'd say when it hits 5-10% is a good place to stop and start charging the battery again.

It doesn't matter how well you try to take care of your battery, lithium-ion batteries are designed to be high current, cheap, and with a relatively decent longevity of 1000 cycles, they will degrade no matter how well you try to take care of them whether you use it or not. They also have lots of quality control issues so its very easy to have defective battery cells in your laptop battery pack. You need a good discharging/recharging maintenance cycle this is key to maximizing battery longevity as it forces cells to reactivate.

There are better battery chemistrys out there such as Lithium Phosphate which I've worked with, which can handle 2500-3000 cycles however they also cost 4-5x as much so no one uses it except for special applications. Just understand that, no matter what you do your battery will degrade from the moment it was manufactured, and the best thing you can do is to use it and not be so worried about it losing capacity because it really wasn't designed to last long to begin with!

 

My 2nd now-dead battery disagrees with your reasoning, I did regular calibration once a month and the eventual lifespan fell short of the 1st battery which I left plugged in all the time in the mains socket. Both of my now dead batteries have yet to see more than 2 years in useful service.

 

But the real question remains, have you changed your use habits at all?

 

On my 3rd battery, assuming I don't forget I will unplug the battery when I'm running off the mains. I will plug in the battery just before I set the PC to sleep mode so that the battery can maintain the system charge without it crashing. I only charge the battery when it's around 15% or less.

I assume everything is working as it should, if I'm away for 8-10 hours the battery loses roughly 8-10% charge maintaining sleep mode and it's been nearly a year now since I first purchased it. By my guess, battery wear is roughly 10-20% since there are occasions when I forget to unplug it from mains when it reaches 100% charge and leave it connected for 2-3 hours.

 

Ideally you want to balance the voltage in all your cells but there are no commercially made laptop battery balancers for end users. A laptop with intelligent charging will do this for you. Ones that simply measure the voltage and derive your percentage of charge from the voltage measured are much less reliable. I have never heard of the battery providing power regulation or noise filtering. That's what the PSU and the limited power regulation on the motherboard are for. The only real case where the battery would provide protection is a catastrophic failure. That's not what it is designed for but a side-effect of the battery being in the circuit and able to absorb voltage spikes or ripples. These can still damage your cells however. In normal usage, almost all power regulation is handled by the PSU and other components like capacitors and inductors inside the system.

The 50% number is not nonsense. After 50% drain, a charge cycle is induced. A battery engineer has told me that the typical Li-Ion has 200 cycles until you will start to see a significant decrease in capacity over that of a new battery. If you discharge your battery to 50%, you'll still have about 1500 total cycles before your battery degrades to only 70% of original capacity. If you discharge to 0% (not really 0% but the shutoff point), you'll have 500 cycles before your battery degrades to that level.

Regarding the charge that you should store your battery at, if stored at 40% power, you'll only have a 4% drop in capacity over one year. If you have the battery constantly at 100%, you can experience up to a 20% drop in capacity over a year.

I am not making these numbers up. These are empirical results from laboratory testing. Everything else I've read in the contrary in this thread are anecdotal results from various posters.



For more information, read this:
How to Prolong Lithium-based Batteries – Battery University

 

I updated it a bit, This:

Its unavoidable.

Quality control is a huge issue with batteries, power supplies and even the power that you get in your house, you guys are worrying too much about something that isn't designed to last that long to begin with.

If you plan to keep your battery at 40% that's fine and ideal for storage but I'd be more worried about the possibility that by removing the battery your laptop is now receiving a less clean source of energy.

 

In any case, I do agree with the lithium research Electric Shock, however I don't think they covered the effects of those practices on a laptop battery pack which can act much different.

You can have all 6 battery cells in a laptop battery at different charge levels and voltages and that always causes complications. When your laptop reports 40% capacity some cells could be even as low as 20% for all you know. Thats why I like to force it down to 10% and charge them all up again in order to try to recalibrate the batteries regularly.

 

Your laptop may have an intelligent charging circuit that includes a built-in balancer. I don't know enough about Clevo's builds to say if this is the case or not. I have not tried balancing the battery or checking the power from individual cells on my own with my external equipment. Certainly, I am not saying you should never cycle to recalibrate, but only do it once a month if possible.

 

Being and engineer for over fifteen years I can tell you lab testing and real-world results don't always match due to the tons of unforeseeable or uncontrollable external factors.

Despite what that "data" suggests you don't know the testing environment or how the batteries were tested. How fast were they charged, were they continued to force charge at 100% or were they trickle charged or just stopped. A billion factors not explained. Those may not be the best, but just to make a point.

Additionally, how do you explain my own and many other members here that have not seen this degradation that you refer to. Perhaps this data is referring to a worse case scenario, which I'll buy considering your statement "UP TO 20%". But to say every laptop and every battery will behave this way is not correct. Most laptops today have some charge regulator to manage the battery. It's in most laptops, and as far as I know every laptop I've owned in the last ten years.

I'm sure you could make a correlation between having your car squeaky clean or dirty, and resultant gas mileage and longevity of your car engine, which theoretically would make a difference. Does this mean I wash my car every day because my car engine might die at 120,000 miles instead of 125,000 if it were always clean? There are so many other factors involved you can't make that kind of blanket statement. It's like saying the sky is blue, so everything blue must be the sky.

 

I think the longevity of this thread will outlast all of our batteries!

 

Haha yeah I was shocked myself this thread went so long, but its all in good fun.

More then likely I don't believe our batteries have any sort of balancing, we're lucky that they even installed a protected circuit that shuts off the current when voltage drops below a threshold (otherwise they'll get lots of dead batteries).

In a laboratory setting, they are able to measure each individual cell's capacity, and then drain the exact amount of energy that represents 40%, however with our laptops we have 6 batteries likely wired in a series and have no way of knowing either the exact capacity or how much is really being drained from the entire pack let alone individual cells.

Honestly you can do whatever you want, even in the best case scenarios batteries can and will fail to meet your expectations.

I mean seriously guys, these sager laptops are high power draining laptops, the worst thing you can do to these batteries is drain them with high current and that's exactly what happens every time your laptop goes on battery power.

My advice, is just leave the batteries in your laptop, use them however, but whatever you do, at least try to re calibrate your battery pack once a month by draining and recharging. If your laptop battery fails prematurely more then likely one of the several cells in your laptop pack just couldn't keep up and wasn't up to the standard such is the life of using multiple batteries in a pack.

 

Regardless of whether or not you agree with these findings (I agree some points are arbitrary such as basing end of life at 70% and their sample size being small) what is the harm in carrying over the generally accepted practices in prolonging battery life? Obviously laboratory testing cannot always be carried over to real world results, but what should we rely on? Anecdotal evidence? The facts are that certain practices will prolong the usable capacity of a battery over it's lifetime. Certain practices are harmful to batteries - the extent of which in regular use is debatable, but they are harmful nonetheless. It's up to the end user to determine how they want to approach this.

Just because you wake up everyday and you feel fine doesn't mean you shouldn't practice preventative medicine until something catastrophic goes wrong with your body and you cannot cope with the disease or injury because you didn't practice simple daily maintenance of your own health over your lifetime.

If you are too lazy to pop out your battery when it takes mere seconds, that is up to you. If your model makes it difficult to do so, then don't do it. I see many more positives to doing so than negatives and it gives me peace of mind because anecdotally I have experienced the opposite of your experiences on many occasions. Just a laboratory result with a small sample size and artificially induced accelerated wear may not totally reflect real world results, neither does your own experiences reflect all real world results either.

 

We need the power because we're MEN!

OORAH!

Mr. Mysterious

 

TOO LAZY TO REMOVE YOUR BATTERY? Do I sense a little cynicism? lol. It has nothing to be with being lazy but everything to do with using something as intended.

If you took a poll, this is purely a guess, but I'd say much less than 1% of laptop users manage or remove their batteries on a regular basis. If batteries are designed to not take that into account then they're doing it wrong... period. And every laptop user is lazy too.

I dunno. All that work for a $100 battery to gain an extra couple months with your battery with the risk of losing data and damaging the machine from bad power... hmm.

To compare a battery designed to be used IN a laptop with daily preventive maintenance makes no sense. Using your same strategy you should then make sure your car is squeaky clean all the time to ensure optimal gas mileage, maybe save you $1/week, enough to buy a new battery after two years...

 

Man I haven't even received my NP8130 yet, although Electric Shock, I do agree they need to develop battery battery software for these laptops.

I work with Lenovos all the time and they definitely set the bar for laptop standards when it comes to regulating battery longevity.

My plan: I could care less about the 8130's battery life at this point because in all honesty your not gonna be able to use the laptop for what its meant for on battery. I plan to get a nice Android tablet when the 4-core Tegra 3 comes out.

 

Duracell???

Screw that, the energizer bunny is inside my laptop running on a wheel. If I drain my battery 90%, he's going to die.

 

I have a 2000wh lithium phosphate battery how long will that run the 8130 for?

Maybe something more productive then this thread, is trying to figure out how to develop a battery that we can put together ourselves to replace lithium-ion.

 

As an engineer, I'm sure you understand the concept of engineered or planned obsolescence. Having perfect faith in something because it must have been engineered or designed that way does not mean it is the absolute right way. Most commercial products are designed to function for all potential consumers of that good for a certain expected duration under an expected average use. That does not mean that changing how you use that good would not improve your experience or the longevity of that item.

SSDs are engineered with provisional capacity to balance out the writes to the drive. They are designed to have a certain average lifetime for the average user. If I take care in preventing unnecessary writes to my drive, I can prolong the lifetime of my drive over that of the average user. What is wrong with that? That is equally applicable to a battery and almost any consumer product. You can do regular maintenance and be obsessive about maintaining the running condition of your car...or you can just drive it into the ground. Both may actually be able to run the same mileage because of good engineering but typically, the well maintained car will have more longevity and reliability.

 

I prefer lithium polymer myself. The iPad 2 uses lipo doesn't it?

 

I would not hesitate to plug in a Lenovo and leave it plugged in. I don't trust Clevo's engineering at all however. These are off the shelf components stuffed in a chassis. They couldn't even get optimus right on many models and their engineers just left it out instead of trying to find a solution and fix it. Alienware (built by another Taiwanese ODM) was able to do so, why not Clevo (which used to be the manufacturer of Alienwares themselves)? There are many flaws with the construction and industrial design in terms of ergonomics. That of course, is what makes these affordable and economical as well.

 

Yes they use lithium polymer, not too much of a difference between lithium polymer and ion though besides one is better for shaping (polymer).

Oh i'm sure Clevo is more then capable of putting optimus into the laptop, most likely more of a matter of switching to a new motherboard with the IGP chip on it.

 

The IGP is in the processor. Do you mean a separate, dedicated chip to negotiate between the discrete GPU and the IGP? IIRC, other vendors don't have to do that. Clevo was just lazy and wanted to get a model out ASAP even though they couldn't solve the bugs they encountered so they just left out the feature entirely. Often, this is no problem but this decision impacts the customer in a large way. I actually don't think battery technology is that bad, it's the efficiency of components that is the issue. Being able to quick sync with the IGP would give users almost twice the running time on battery.

 

Hmm I thought there was a chip that was needed for the optimus to work, although most likely its something clevo just decided to neglect till the next revision.

 

I wouldn't rate the Alienware solution too highly, owners of SB models of the newer Alienwares have plenty of problems with their battery switching technology. At any rate, battery life goes up to 2 hours even with the high-end 8170s, if that's not good enough for you there's always the vaunted Alienware to pick if battery life is such a make-or-break factor in purchases.

 

I personally wouldn't touch Optimus. Would prefer a hard switch even if it required a reboot. For one, driver support suffers with switchable graphics. With separate GPU's switchable you could install the native drivers instead of waiting on the laptop vendor to provide them. Also, you are trusting the software to switch for you, and everything I've read is this is far from seamless. I'm sure it will get there since every CPU will have a GPU, it'd be stupid not to support it, but there's still lots of tuning to take place before I'll touch it.

 

Yeah, I agree with this as well. A hard switch is a much more elegant and stable solution. With a modern SSD, the laptop boots in 10-15 seconds so it's not a big deal to power off and on again.

 

Alienware was immediately off my list because they are extremely ugly and unprofessional looking. I want to have a laptop that has a business look for work, I don't want to look like some teenager to my clients.

Also, the Alienwares have really bad glossy screens. I had trouble see anything when sitting next to a window or a brightly lit room.

But if anything, it is proof of concept.

 

Take up your complaints with the Clevo engineers then, I did not see any proof behind your allegations that the engineers were "lazy" and failed to implement the switchable graphics (Wi-di etc.) in their SB chassis because it wasn't worth their time. As HTWingNut has already mentioned, the models which have implemented switcheable graphics in high-end SB models are somewhat restricted to one brand with full functionality somewhat dubious in nature.

 

I'd rather have dubious functionality that works most of the time than no functionality at all. Reportedly, most of the problems were due to Punkbuster kicking users and so Clevo simply did not include the feature on their higher end notebooks.

How exactly is Optimus dubious on Alienware models? I'm sure it is mostly reliable and functional for Dell to put it on market.

 

You don't even need to cycle the power with a hard wired switch in some cases. Look at the Sony Vaio Z as proof of this - it has a 3 way hard switch with Speed, Stamina and Auto modes. On Speed, it runs on the discrete GPU all the time, on Stamina, the IGP and on Auto, it detects if the laptop is plugged in. If it is, then it runs on discrete. If it's not, then it runs on the IGP.

Such an elegant solution existed with technology more than a year old. I sure miss that laptop.

Pic below:

 

^ That's pretty awesome. How does the Asus G53/G73 system work with the Turbo button? What does the Turbo button do for those systems?

The Clevo of course feels terribly cheap compared to almost any Vaio model. How I wish I had a modern Vaio trackpad! It feels so good!

 

Lenovo had a graphics card switching feature for their laptops as well. It worked with the Radeon cards, though in any case I'm glad it doesn't have optimus because I do feel the technology is still a bit premature, especially if you plan to use it in a production environment in the slightest as optimus has some conflicts with CAD and other 3D software sometimes.

Anyway, back to topic at hand guys otherwise this thread may as well be closed.

 

Yeah but there is no way any VAIO can compete with a 8150 with a 485M and 2820QM

Mr. Mysterious

 

A quick search on "Optimus problems" using the native search function revealed the following gems:


This is for an Asus notebook.

This is for the Dell XPS.

This is for the Alienware M17x.

I didn't bother including the 60+ page stickied Optimus problems whitelist for the M11x since that's not high-end. Since it was a quick search, I found nothing on Punkbuster issues causing optimus problems, some games like MapleStory don't even use Punkbuster to work properly.

Back on topic: The Vostro 1500 I use currently doesn't make it hard to disconnect the battery, but I can't vouch for the 81xx Clevos especially if owners confirm you need screwdrivers to get the battery out safely. I can only hope battery charging features have improved from 4 years ago if I'm not able to disconnect the battery on my own 8170 when running off the mains outlet.

 

Nope, it's very easy to remove my battery. It just pops out of it's locking mechanism.

Mr. Mysterious

 

My conclusion then would be to take the battery out when it's fully charged and the laptop is running off the mains outlet with little risk of a power outage, I'm almost certain batteries hate being overcharged and the heat generated from the high-end 8170 configurations is sure to be detrimental to battery longevity.

 

That laptop probably used NVIDIA's "old" hybrid graphics. It's the same setup that's in the M11x R1. Users have the option of choosing which GPU they want. They can be on the IGP for everyday tasks then use a hotkey (like on the M11x) or physical switch (like on the Vaio) to choose the discreet GPU when needed. The only downside to this system was that you were 100% reliant on the OEM to provide drivers. You could theoretically use the latest drivers from NVIDIA for the discreet GPU, but you would lose the ability to switch.

For all its problems, at least with Optimus you have the ability to get more consistent updates directly from NVIDIA.

There's a big thread at the NVIDIA forums detailing this problem.

 

That was another one HTWingnut was talking about. 81xx owners can take their batteries out one handed with their eyes closed in seconds.

 

Thanks for the information guys, I always have my laptop plugged in and have had it like that for over 1 and a half years... I suppose I'm probably too late for this battery. Anyways thanks for the info

 

Make a small test and see how long is your battery lasting on idle, just to see how much damage is there.

 

There's a software that can check your battery wear level. I can't remember what it was. Let me check tmw. If you remember how long your battery lasted on a certain setting when new, compare to how long it lasts on the same setting now?

 

The app most use is BatteryBar. It will tell you designed capacity and actual capacity. It's free for use, but you register and pay whatever fee you want you get an unlocked version for all it's features. But the free version will do.

You will also have to deplete your battery at least 50% for it to calibrate properly.

Here's my battery after five months of use:



0% battery wear. I will admit new it was like 1 or 2% over designed capacity, plugged in 99% of the time. But was even used on a couple occasions strictly on battery to about 20%. I game quite a bit on it, with CPU & GPU running at 80C+. So I don't believe this 20% degradation after a year hoo haa. If it's 5% degraded I'll be surprised even. But I rest my case.