Laptop Battery Question

[Xavien]

Ive always had desktop pcs so im not familar with laptops. Ive recently bought a laptop from
pcspecialists and i have a question about the battery.

I will (for the most part) be running the laptop off the power supply. If i leave the battery in
constantly charging will i do any damage to the battery or low its life span?

If so what do people recommend as there are a lot of conflicting info on the net and i would
like to get correct advice. Thank you for any help.

 

[steaky360]

I'm not sure about that, I haven't heard anything concrete either way. I know my work laptop is constantly plugged in but still has a pretty good battery life when it occasionally isn't powered by mains. Similarly my laptop at home has a similar life to what it had when new and it spent most of its life plugged in. So from my experience I'd say no it doesn't matter, but I've got no real evidence either way.

You could ask PCS for their opinion?

 

[mantadog]

As far as I understand it can have a negative effect. But again im no expert, apart from the fact every laptop we have had in the house died after a couple of years of no battery use. The way round it (apparently) is to unplug it from the mains and use the battery every now and again just to keep the juices flowing so to speak.

If you plan to use it on the battery somewhat regularly anyway, it should be fine.

 

[ubuysa]

My long experience with laptops is that leaving them constantly plugged in to the charger does shorten battery life. That said, battery technology is constantly improving and today's batteries suffer from this effect much less than the older ones did. If you downloaod the excellent temperature monitoring tool HWMonitor from http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html you'll see that it also reports on the capacity of your battery and on it's wear level. I keep my Optimus IV plugged in most of the time and in the almost 1 year I've had it the wear level is 8%. The reported designed capacity is 76960 mWh and it's current full charge capacity is now 71114 mWh, so it has degraded somewhat. Every now and then I will unplug the charger and leave the laptop running on battery until I get the low battery warning notification when I plug it back in.

To be perfectly honest though I wouldn't worry about it, by the time you're needing another battery you'll probably also be wanting to upgrade to the latest laptop too!