Laptop batteries

On my laptop computer, sometimes I leave the power cord pluggedin all night as I forget to unplug it. I always thought that it would not hurtthe battery. I was told by someone thatthe cord should not be plugged in any longer than needed. He also said that itis not a good idea to charge the battery unless it is needed. In other wordsdon't plug in the power cord unless the battery is at least 75% drained. I always thought that you couldplug it in anytime you felt like it. But,I've been known to be wrong. Could I get some feedback from some of themembers?
Thanks, Frank.

Laptop batteries will die over time, plain and simple. Usually last 1 to 2 years. Just use it and worry less about it.

Laptop batteries will stop charging once they are fully charged, I have been using without removing the battery but switch off the mains at the end of the day for the past 5 yrs and still the battery can hold charge for 1hr usage.

Here's some interesting info: Should I Leave My Laptop Plugged In All The Time? - How-To Geek

It really depends on how your laptop's charging system is designed, and unfortunately it's almost impossible to know what the correct thing to do is. If you have a properly designed system with a proper voltage regulator, then when the battery is full, it will stop charging and there is no problem. The battery should not "overcharge". But.. there could be a fault in the charging system which could cause overcharging, or it may just be poorly designed. So it's hard to know.

Further, if the laptop gets hot, which happens with a lot of "desktop replacement" laptops with beefy processors. Then the battery also gets hot, and that can decrease the life of the battery.

Another possible issue is if your power supply is under-powered, then that could result in battery discharge and charge cycles. The same could be true for a poorly designed charging circuit, where power is constantly seeping out of the battery and then a recharge cycle occurs.

I usually recommend that if you're just using it at your desk, take the battery out and run it on mains. You should stick the battery back in every week or so to keep it charged. This has some disadvantages though. If the power plug gets knocked loose, you will of course lose whatever you're working on. Same if there's a power outage (unless you're connected to a UPS).

Yep, this is true. You need to take the battery out of the laptop when you don't use it for a long time. A good general rule is if that you're not using the laptop on the battery daily, you should just take it and store it somewhere cool. When you keep the battery in the laptop and not use it and keep it plugged in all the time, it actually reduces the charge capacity of the battery even from not using it. It can get to the point where the battery reports an incorrect battery life in Windows. Actually, one of the features in Windows 7 was it will tell you in the notification tray when you click on the battery icon whether or not you should replace it. I've seen it happen where Windows didn't say the battery should be replaced, and that the battery still had 33% left, but died in five minutes. It had like a 40ish minute life fully charged. This was because it was on the charger with the battery in it all the time for a year I think.

But yeah, point being, don't keep the battery in the laptop when you don't use it on battery for a long time. Ideally, you should use it on battery daily to "exercise" it figuratively speaking to prevent premature wear on the lithium cells.

But no matter what you do, your batteries are not going to last forever. So, you can pull the battery out, store it in a cool place, exercise it daily, not let it get hot and it might last 22 months. Or, you can just use it and not think about it and get 18 months out of it. Whether the effort is worth it is up to you.

I don't know whether I count, since my battery is for rare trips and power outages uncertainty. My oldest laptop's almost always plugged in as is my newer one, and the older system is nearly four years old. It's only been drained the one time that someone forgot it wasn't switched on at the power point. Also all my laptops are used with a cooling pad and I'm vigilant on how hot they get. I just don't use them for mobility often.

My last laptop, Toshiba at 4yrs old still had battery power for about half the run time of when new. Its battery was left plugged in 100% of the time always on AC & the laptop was always on, never slept or switched off.

Current Lenovo has a setting to maintain battery at a peak of 50% - and recharges to 50% when it drops to 45% of charge - is recommended setting when used always on the power brick for maximum battery health.

So in my use.. the battery main function is emergency back up power for that stormy weather when the power suddenly goes off... then I might as well shut down because my router/modem drops the connection. At least I can shut down cleanly.

Leaving the battery in-place while on AC allows you to disable windows write-cache buffer flushing on the hard drive & should gain some additional hard drive life by stopping all the constant writes.

I wish there was a third party battery maintance program that worked similar. I hate the Lenovo other settings.