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By Jared Spurbeck | Upgrade Your Life Fri, Aug 19, 2011
Laptop battery wearing down? In this week's episode of Upgrade Your Life,
Yahoo! News' Becky Worley shows us how to help batteries last longer ... and
what to do when they run out!
First, the basics
Most laptops use batteries that can last for 3-5 years, or about 1000 charges.
(A premium laptop's battery might last longer.) Every time you charge your
battery, the total capacity of the battery is diminished. Originally it may
have had a run time of 3.5 hours, but after a year it'll run out of juice at 3
hours, even on a full charge.
If your battery capacity has diminished, there are a few things you can do
about it. First, you have to correctly gauge how much capacity has been lost.
There are free downloads to do this job, like Battery Bar (for Windows PCs) or
Coconut Battery (for Macs). These will compare your battery's current maximum
capacity to how long it lasted when it was new.
(UPDATE- we originally recommended Battery Eater and while the program works
great, their download site has been compromised and we are recommending an
alternate program, Battery Bar downloadable from CNET.)
Calibrating your Battery
You can't miraculously reconstitute your battery's capacity. It loses power
over time due to chemical reactions taking place in the battery, as it chugs
along powering your laptop. You can't undo those changes, but there is one
common battery issue you can fix: In many laptops, the operating system's
battery meter gets out of sync with how much juice the battery actually has.
Imagine if the gas gauge on your car dashboard was misreading how much gas you
actually had in the tank. You'd either run out of gas when you thought you had
a quarter of a tank left, or you'd be filling up too frequently. In your
laptop, this can mean your laptop shuts down abruptly when the meter says you
have 30 minutes left. Or else the meter might warn that you only have 2 minutes
of battery life left and shut your laptop down, when it really has another 20
minutes remaining.
Recalibrating gets the battery meter to correctly read the current state of the
battery, so you and the operating system know where you stand with existing
battery life.
How to recalibrate
First, charge your laptop's battery to full, and leave it that way for at least
two hours. Then unplug your laptop, and set its power management settings to
never turn off or lower the monitor brightness. (HP has instructions for how do
to this on Windows 7 and Vista, as well as Windows XP, while Apple has
instructions for Mac laptops on their site.)
You want to drain the battery completely, then let your laptop sit for at least
five hours this way -- like, say, overnight. (Just be careful and mute the
volume, since some laptops make a warning sound when they're about to run out.)
Afterwards, charge it up again, and you should notice a more accurate portrayal
of your battery capacity. In some cases, you may even get more life out of it.
Best practices to maintain battery life
You'd think that the best way to keep your laptop's battery from wearing out is
to not use it. Right?
As it turns out, batteries are like muscles; they need to be worked out
regularly to stay healthy. Ideally, you'd use your laptop unplugged at least
once a day, like on a train or bus commute or on the couch in front of the TV.
If you're not going to use it, constantly charging your battery is a bad idea;
HP recommends on their website that if you're going to leave your laptop
plugged in or put up in storage for more than two weeks, you should take the
battery out of your laptop.
Past the expiration date
So when is it time to throw out that old battery? The answer, surprisingly, is
"never." Laptop batteries contain lots of toxic chemicals, and should never end
up in landfills. Fortunately, e-stewards.org has a list of environmentally
responsible recyclers that will take your old battery with no fuss.
When is it time to replace your battery, then? Use the free utility apps Becky
mentioned, and when they say that your battery can only hold around 25% of its
original capacity it's probably time for a new one. You can buy a replacement
battery from the original laptop manufacturer, and there are plenty of places
online that sell discounted PC laptop batteries, like Laptops for Less and
Batteries.com. Owners of newer Mac laptops can get their laptop's non-removable
battery swapped out at any Apple store, with a scheduled appointment.