Optimal battery maintainence

Any tips/ideas for this? especially for when AC power is connected for prolonged periods of time?

I've heard some recommend to charge the battery to 50%, pop it out and store it elsewhere. The manual recommends complete discharge every 30 partial charges. I keep the laptop plugged in almost always, is it constantly partial charging then?

The manual also suggests a power profile to discharge the battery. However it says to set critical battery levels to 0% which Windows (7) will not allow (minimum is 1%), and I'd tend to agree... a sudden power loss could cause the heads to crash, why would the manual suggest this!?

 

buy another battery?

i dont know why your reading too much into this as battery last for *years* until they need changing.

Surely it'll be more economical and make your life a hell of alot easier in the long run to just replace the battery after a few years...

then spend countless years worrying if you have charged it more then 30 times and the time keep on maintaince.

hm?

 

As long as you fully condition your notebook battery once a month, it will be in top shape. By conditioning, I mean discharging a fully charged battery down to zero, then charging it back to 100.

When your battery hits zero as reported by the system, that is the minimum safe limit. Your battery will sever any current output once it hits "reported" zero. It is completely safe to use your battery anywhere from zero to 100.

Many users suggest that you not discharge the battery too low whether it be below 50%, 40%, 10%, etc. Any engineer will tell you that's bullsh*t. However, the real case is that you would need to disassemble the battery, remove the PCB circuit board to remove the safe limits, then use the battery in order to discharge below a safe level. Only then would that cause harm to the cells. The same goes for charging. You can leave the battery plugged in all day long, or all week long. The PCB would protect the battery from being charged over it's safe limit. None of us would take apart our batteries, so it is impossible to charge or discharge your battery outside of the safe limit.

Case and point, don't worry about it. You can charge and discharge whenever you want and however you want. Discharge it to zero, recharge it to 100. Leave it plugged in all the time or cycle it dozens of times a day. It doesn't matter. All modern Li-Ion battery packs are stupid proof.

This is me delivering my testimony. http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5103097&postcount=3

 

good to know, thanks for the insight

 

Ah, I forgot to mention. Condition your battery when you first receive your laptop.

 

I had read that in the manual, but seeing as windows wasn't installed yet I had no way to drain it. I was contemplating leaving up the BIOS, but decided risking burn-in wasn't worth it.

Now that Win7 is installed I've conditioned it (full drain then charge) once, I hope this will still do the trick?

 

You don't need an OS to condition the battery.

If you have done it already, then that's good.

 

So, would it be fine if I left the laptop charging overnight? This is while the laptop is turned off.

 

Yes, that is perfectly fine.

 

Hi Soviet Sunrise, to get your laptop to discharge to 0%, do you disable the auto standby and hibernate at xx%?

 

I usually log out of Windows at the last 10% or so and reboot into system BIOS and let it sit there. But yes, you can disable standby and hibernate, and set the OS to attempt shut down at 1%, but that's the lazy way and there is risk of losing unsaved data.