Battery matters

[The Natural Philosopher]

For lithium store at half charge in cool place.

Best to not keep in laptop permanently connected to mains.

[The Natural Philosopher]

same here with acer. left plugged in always. battery dead.

[Davey]

I just went into Win 7, and the 80% thing is in there. I also looked at the Help and Support pages, and there is a BIOS setting that does a full Discharge and Calibration, (D&C) taking several hours, so I'll set that going tonight, and see what else is in there at the same time. (Hint: for the females of the species, a D&C means something else!). More tomorrow. At least I, and I hope others, am/are learning something; many thanks.

[Andy Burns]

I thought I'd seen 50% charge, and in the fridge.

My Lenovo has a power setting to keep the battery at max 50% charge, to maximize the life of the battery, you can temporarily force it to do a

100% charge in advance for those times when you know you'll want maximum battery power.

[Davey]

After my normal evening backup and shutdown, I then re-booted and went into the BIOS. I found the 80% charge option, which was already checked, and also the D&C initiation. I set this going, it said that the battery was at 79%, and said that it was doing the process. But instead of the estimated 3-4 hours, I came back to the machine after maybe 30 minutes, and it was all shut down. I re-booted it as normal, with mains power. Now, how do I find out what, if anything, it discovered about the battery? Go back into BIOS again? Or would the Win7 OS have something to tell me, I wonder? And how do I temporarily tell it to charge to 100% when I want full power, or is the only way to reboot, go into BIOS, and uncheck the 80% selection? Hmmm.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

40% ~ 50% in the fridge, yes.

[Apellation Controlee]

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I've all but given up on taking care of batteries (those of mine that matter are all now Li-ion). I just use the laptop in whatever mode - plugged/unplugged - is convenient at the time, and recharge if/when it needs it. As you can't really measure the effectiveness of a care regime, I decided that lavishing £200-worth of care to preserve the life of £100-worth of battery was becoming slightly pointless. Capacity declines whatever you do.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

It appears to be keeping the battery at 100% all the time is the main part of the problem. If you regularly use your laptop on batteries, you might just put up with the shortened life. But many never leave the home, so can be run on mains all the time. So simply remove the battery, and only fit it when needed. That cost nothing, and is hardly inconvenient.

[Tim+]

Except that most laptop charger connections are crappily designed and a slight wobble could lead to a sudden total loss of power. Could be a real PITA if you've forgotten that you don't have the battery in and haven't saved a document or something.

Tim

[charles]

I suspect that some equipment relies on the battery being present to stabilies the power rail.

[Andy Champ]

So run it on the mains. If the battery dies buy another, but only use when out and about, leaving the nearly-dead one in there the rest of the time.

Andy

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Never had that problem on either of mine - both Acer, so hardly in the Rolls Royce class. I'd suggest you need to get yours fixed.

[djc]

Provided you know in advance when you will need to use the battery, and can shut down laptop, put in battery, take it up to full charge, before yo need to go out and about. The other benefit of a battery is that it can be used as an uninteruptable power supply.

[Andy Burns]

Except you lose the free inbuilt UPS ...

[Tim+]

Laptops in our house have had a hard time in the past what with dogs and children circulating around the room, heedless of power cables. We've probably had more than our fair share of damaged power leads and damaged sockets due to this but I still maintain that most sockets are badly designed. A tug on a properly designed power connection shouldn't transmit any force to the socket or motherboard in my opinion, which is why our latest laptop is a macbook.

Tim

Children have left but dogs remain

[whisky-dave]

Apple also advise discharging the battery every couple of months and charging up again from 0 this helps keep the battery in good condition and the circuit % to give a more accurate reading.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Where I live there's only been one power cut in the last 20 years - and we had a couple of weeks notice of it. Is the rest of the country so different?

And my left on charge battery would only run the laptop for a minute or so after about 2 years. So a very expensive UPS.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

How about any of the other connections you might make to it? USB, HDMI, etc?

I'd say it impossible to make any small connector which is bomb proof.

[Tim+]

Once again, you're choosing to ignore the fact that a laptop is a portable appliance and as such, is much more likely to suffer a supply interruption for reasons I've already explained. I have no UPS on my desktop and have never felt the need to have one.

Tim

[Tim+]

The power lead is the one lead that most folk have plugged in for the greatest time. As such, it deserves the most protection. To NOT consider the effect of power lead "trauma" on a portable device is just bad design. The requirements are very simple with few connections to consider. The use of a magnetic connection on a MacBook not only protects the connector and motherboard, it protects the laptop from physical damage caused by the power lead dragging the laptop off tables etc. if I someone walks into the wire.

Look inside many mains powered portable devices and you'll find that the power socket is case or chassis mounted with flexible leads to the circuit board. There's no reason other than cost cutting why this couldn't be done with laptops. Ribbon cables could be used between USB and HDMI cables to avoid motherboard damage but I've personally never had a problem with those.

But hey, if you're happy with your laptop power socket, fine. It's obviously "good enough" for you.

Tim