Battery life: first discharge

You should have a lithium battery not the older nickel cadmium or nickel hydride batteries which had a memory effect and required special refreshing operations periodically to maintain battery life.

A lithium battery should run fine but it does have a limited number of charges (several hundred usually).

So, it is better to run the battery all the way down (until it signals you to recharge it often at about 10% power not when it is completely dead) and recharge it rather than run it half way and recharge it all the time.

I try to use the battery and recharge it at least once a week but if you use the computer more and are at a fixed spot use the notebook with the battery fully charged and the A/C plugged in and then you will not be depleting the battery all the time when not necessary.

Note also that many notebooks have an A/C brick that gets very hot when you are BOTH charging the battery and using the notebook so ideally charge the notebook battery when possible with the computer off.

Most of the time I use my Notebook at home. So I would like to use the battery only outdoor so I would like to get some tips to save the battery.

I had bad experiences before. With my another Notebook Compaq Pressario most of the time I used without the battery then one day I used it but my almost new battery did not work properly, it ruined itself. I charged it the whole day but within a few minutes the battery death.

Please give me some advice or tips of storing and saving battery.

Regards,

Early

I used to race RC cars powered with batteries so I know a bit about type of batteries and how they work. Also I only use laptops (no desktop) so know pretty much how similar those batteries perform like those RC batteries. 3 most common types are NiCD, NiMH and Lithium Ion.

If you have Lithium Ion, the old saying about fully discharge and fully charge for 3x in the beginning doesn't apply. You don't need to do it that BUT you still need to use it once in a while to avoid having dead cell. Also, NEVER store your battery fully discharge or else some of the cell died.

NiMH batteries however will have their voltage drops in daily basis so you want to recharge it at least once every 2-3 week so that they are not fully discharged.

When I say dead cell, it doesn't necessarily mean one of the 6 cell of 12 cell battery gone bad. We (the serious RC car racers) have a device (not a regular voltmeter) to check each battery cell. Using it, we can check the cell one by one and can find out how well each cell stores and delivers the power and if any part of that one cell has gone bad. That's why overtime, laptop battery doesn't perform as well compare to when you got them the first time because certain area in any of the cell has gone bad.

Another advice is not to buy cheap replacement battery. You can get those cheap one many times in Ebay and some battery replacement stores. Although they may be new, you don't know if any of the cell has gone (partially bad). Always buy from the company or their distributors because they always check the performance of each cell (quality control). My guess is that they throw away the (not so good) cells cheaply to outside sources. Then those people sell them almost half the cost. Those cheap batteries WILL work well in the first month or two but the performance drop significantly after every recharge.

Thank you for the input. My battery is Lithum Ion, I hope your advice will help my battery a lot.