Wholesaleeshop.com.au: Battery Cares – Don’t take your laptop’s battery to extremes

There's a lot of confusion about the care and feeding of laptop batteries, to judge from my latest Web chat: Should you avoid running on battery to prolong its life--or rely on the battery as

much as possible to keep it fresh? The answer is neither: As long as you don't rely only on wall current or inflict constant discharge-recharge cycles on the battery, you should be fine. In other words, keeping the laptop plugged into the outlet by the coffee table or the desk is fine as long as you take it to somewhere else every few weeks. (Or, if your electricity is sufficiently unreliable, you could leave it plugged in and wait for the battery to get a workout during your next outage.)

As I explained in a Help File item last March, the lithium-ion batterie(laptop battery,Compaq v6000 batteries)s in most laptops will start to weaken after enough usage cycles, but it will take anywhere from 300 (HP's estimate) to 1,000 (Apple's) for them to drop to 80 percent of their original capacity. So if your laptop mostly stays at home, you shouldn't have to worry about replacing its battery for at least a couple of years.

(About the "PostPoints tip" title: I archive each tip-of-the-week e-mail we send to PostPoints members under this blog's "Tips" category. Today's item went out on Feb. 22.)

Meanwhile...

* My column synthesized a few thoughts I've had about the disconnect between the ever-increasing utility of smartphones and the persistent unwillingness of other gadgets to take advantage of such smartphone capabilities as easy photo sharing and near-instant GPS location sensing.

* And in Help File, I covered a different sort of Dell d630 battery Dell gk479 batteries--the watch-size unit that keeps your computer's clock ticking along until it silently fails after a few years.

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Running the battery out very quickly by drawing a lot of power at once is another way to cause it a lot of strain. For example, running a graphics-intensive game on a smartphone or a notebook for a couple of hours while unplugged is worse for the battery than depleting it over several hours while e-mailing or Internet-browsing (heat is a factor here, too). Again with the running analogy: it's probably harder on you to sprint a mile than to jog it.

If you have a spare battery you don't use that often, manufacturers say the best way to store it is at 40 or 50 percent charge in a cool place, like a refrigerator (but not too cold, as extreme temperatures cause capacity loss, so don't put it in the freezer just because there's extra room next to the peas).

These usage points are not going to drastically affect the lifespan of your battery; that is, you can't make it last forever if your carefully cycle the battery down to 50 percent the second it's full and never use it for anything more intensive than the occasional flash game. Most manufacturers will give you an "up to" figure (up to 80 percent of its original capacity after 1,000 cycles, for example), and careful use will help you reach that, but you won't get too far beyond it. However, following these guidelines (Use your battery. Not too much. Mostly for small apps.) will help your reach the upper echelons of manufacturer estimates.

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