the laptop battery life
why completely discharging a laptop battery would help keep it in peak condition. As many of
you would know, rechargable batteries tend to suffer from a memory effect, where they tend to
charge up only to the highest level they were last charged up to, and discharge only to the lowest
level they were last discharged to. The trick for battery manufacturers has been to engineer
batteries to avoid this effect. Batteries are much better now than they were, but it is still the
case that if you tend to only partially discharge your laptop battery before recharging it, you will
probably find that the maximum battery life will decline, perhaps markedly.
The best example I saw of this recently was with someone who has an IBM Thinkpad. The
battery life had dropped to less than an hour. IBM provide a neat utility that gives you a
constant view of the state of the battery. Using that as a guide, the owner was able to discharge
and recharge the battery more fully each time until it got back to a two hour battery life. Maybe
this problem will go away when we get laptops with fuel cells, but until then, it's still a good habit
to discharge your battery as much as possible (or practical) before recharging it. For my part, I
usually try to wait till mine is down to 10-15% of its peak charge before recharging it.
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