What does a full discharge and partial discharge of a laptop

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I have a new laptop battery, and I was reading how to maximise battery life. But how do i full discharge it and partial discharge it..not quite sure what to do. Could you please tell me how to care for my battery? thank-you.

i think by discharge they mean run it on bat power till it nearly dead for full discharge and half discharge i believe means run it on batt power till half batt power

I've been told by a friend who is a professional electrician that full discharge of a battery ruins it, that everytime it fully discharges it looses some charging power.

jlsvc92 got it. The deeper you cycle a battery, the more storage capacity you loose. I pull the batteries from mine when leaving it on my stand over a day or more.

They want you to calibrate the battery by completely discharging it. The battery needs to be recalibrated from time to time to keep the onscreen battery time and percent display accurate and to keep the battery operating at maximum efficiency.

Just make sure you completely drain the battery down to zero every few months or so. Most people probably do that anyway.

Last edited by Max000 on 29 May 2013, 7:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Why does it need to be calibrated exactly to operate efficiently what bad stuff happens when you don't calibrate.

Nothing bad will happen, as such - it's just that any estimates of remaining battery life will be inaccurate.

So your machine can accurately calculate how much battery power is left.

Nothing bad will happen. It just won't calculate right, so your machine will not be running as efficiently as it could be, and you won't be getting an accurate reading of how much battery power you have left.

If the new batteries are like the iPhone, the guide is to let it run down to under 10% at least once a month and then do a full charge to 100%.

I don't think you need to run to empty anymore, but just once and a while let it drop to 10% or lower.

What if you start each day @ 100% and then re-charge to 100% every evening?
During the day it may drop to 80-95% depending on usage.

Is this practice good or bad?

I was always told as far as batteries go you don't use it you lose it. An IT person got on my case once for keeping my laptop mostly plugged in. I guess you need at least some cycling if the battery on a normal basis to keep your battery in good condition.

Since the OP is probably referring to Li-ion batteries, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery
...particularly "Battery pack life" and " Conditioning controversy" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-i ... _pack_life

(one of the Wiki cites links to this article about extending Li-ion battery life:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/five-a ... y-life/289 )

Just in case you're not already doing this, another thing that you can do to maximise battery life is when the battery is fully charged, and you're running the system on AC, is to remove the battery from the computer, and only put it back in before you unplug the system from AC Power.

That's true, but I prefer to just plug/unplug my laptop accordingly.