One of the concerns that plague laptop owners is whether or not they should make an effort to run down their laptop computer battery to nothing before charging it back up again. Sometimes this just isn’t convenient, such as when you shut down your laptop at night and it only has 15 minutes of battery time left. That 15 minutes is certainly not enough to get your through the next day, but if you plus the laptop in to charge it, are you shortening your battery life?
The brief answer is probably not, although there are some considerations to make.
If you have an older laptop that contains a bulky nickel cadmium battery, then by all means drain the power from the battery down to nothing each time. This is because the battery contains memory of a full charge. If you don’t drain it, then the next time you charge it up, it will have set a new benchmark for where a full charge is. In other words, it will think it is fully charged when it is not. At a minimum, fully discharge the battery every three months.
Most modern laptops contain the newer lithium ion battery. This battery does not retain a memory, so charging it back up when it is not completely drained should not cause too many problems. That said, you should still run the battery down to zero at least every 30 charges or so. This is not to reset the battery, but to reset the fuel gauge on your laptop, that is, the indicator that tells you exactly how much battery life and time you have left on your charge. Running the laptop battery all of the way down to empty helps the fuel gage re-calibrate itself to give you a more accurate reading.
Laptop batteries do need to be replaced eventually, even with proper care, just as car batteries do. After two years of daily use, most of it unplugged, I had to replace the battery on my Apple iBook G4, the same laptop I am using right now to write this to you.
Mary Ann Romans writes about everything related to saving money in the Frugal Blog, technology in the Computing Blog, and creating a home in the Home Blog. You can read more of her articles by clicking here.
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