Saving my laptop's battery??

Question

i got myself a laptop recently, but being a complete idiot in the maintenance and stuff, i charged my laptop's battery for only about 4 hours for its first charge. It's a li-ion battery, and i've so far only used it 3 times.... the battery gets drained pretty fast each time (max was about 3 hours ++).

Is there anyway to save it?

Answer 1

what i suggest that after your done using an application, like word or excel, quit them.  and lets say you leave for a half hour or more, put it to sleep. Or you can talk to maintenance and staff to get a new battery.

Answer 2

You'd need to change the power management settings to get more battery life, it's almost unheard of for a laptop to default to the most aggressive power saving on battery even though that is the way to get the most life out of the battery, even just changing to the long life setting should help quite a bit.

You should also dim the screen to the lowest readable brightness.

About 3 hours or so isn't too far out of line, especially if the power management settings haven't be optimised for battery runtime, if you really need long battery life you might be able to purchase larger batteries (check with the laptop manufacturer if that is interesting).

Also charge the computer up whenever you get a chance, Li-Ion really shouldn't be discharged often if you can help it (once every few months to recalibrate the battery meter is all you need, even then that won't actually improve the battery, just cause the state of charge reading to become accurate).  You can also expect the performance of the battery to get worse over time (and there's nothing you can do about it, unless you aren't using the battery in which case discharging to 40% charge and sticking it in the fridge will slow the aging).

Also be careful about people giving advise for Nickel batteries as though that advise applies to Lithium batteries (if you follow their advise of discharging every time you use the battery you'll ruin the battery pretty quickly).

Answer 3

Modern laptop batteries cannot be overcharged or undercharged. Pretty much the only way they can be damaged is by heat. Charge it overnight, and you will likely get as much time out of it as you're supposed to. If you find you're getting much less time than others get with your same laptop, it's most likely your power management settings. 3 hours is typical for many modern laptops.

Answer 4

There are several things you can do to extend your laptop's battery/on time.

Each of them cuts down on 'usability' a bit, but extends on time a bit also.

If you are writing a story. manuscript, theme paper, you don't need your Bluetooth on while you're typing. Turn it off, and you'll save a little power.

The same applies to your wi-fi. If you shut that off you can save several minutes worth of data.

Set your laptop to spin down the hard drive whenever possible is another way to save a small amount of power.

Last but not least, bite the bullet, and buy a spare battery. Keep it charged and carry it with you. When you need another 3 hours, just swap it in.