When I bought a new notebook recently, I resolved to take better care of my laptop battery this time than I had with my previous ones. With my last laptops the battery was more or less dead after a year or so. If a battery is treated with care it can last up to four years. I thought that I knew how a notebook battery has to be handled, but after googling this topic, I realized that quite a few of my beliefs were outdated. Most of my layman’s knowledge about rechargeable batteries was related to Nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) and nickel-cadmium (NiCd) batteries, which are no longer used in laptops (as far as I know). In this post, I summarize the tips I found on the web to preserve lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, which are probably in most laptops nowadays.

There are two important keywords when it comes to battery preservation: charging and temperature. That is, how the batteries are charged, and the temperatures to which they are exposed, are key factors that determine their lifespan. Today I will write about how temperature influences the lifespan of a laptop battery, and in my next post I will cover charging and discharging.

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A laptop battery can be charged 300-1000 times. The actual number depends on the way it has been treated. In the last post of this series, I outlined the influence that the temperature has on a battery’s lifespan. Today, I will explain how a battery should be charged and discharged with care.

Fully discharge a new battery and then re-charge it. This calibrates the battery.

Calibrate the battery every 30 charges, i.e., fully discharge it and charge afterwards.

Avoid frequent full discharges. In contrast to NiCd (Nickel-cadmium) and NiMh (Nickel-metal hydride) batteries, Li-ion (Lithium-ion) batteries show no memory effect. That is, it will do no harm to the battery if it is re-charged before it is empty. Full discharges will strain the battery.

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In the last two parts of this series, I covered the factors of temperature and charging. While the high temperatures inside modern laptops are probably the worst enemy of a Li-ion battery, frequent discharge/charge cycles will negatively influence a battery’s life. If your laptop is a desktop replacement, then you probably only need the battery every now and then. It can be quite frustrating if you want to use your laptop for the first time after a year without AC, only to realize that your batteries are already dead even though you never really used them. However, if you remove the battery from the laptop and store it accurately, there is a good chance that it will be in good condition when you need it next time.

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