I have a Dell Latitude D 630 ( yeah, it’s old but it does everything I want it to do ), I have it plugged in to an adapter and the wall socket. I never use the battery, but have been told I should run down the battery about once a month.
Is this a good idea or not or doesn’t it matter ?
Should I remove the battery ?
If you’re not using the battery at all and want to preserve it you should discharge it to 50%, remove it, and store it in the freezer. Be sure to let it warm back up to room temp before plugging it back into the laptop.
I don’t plan on ever using the battery but who knows what the future will bring.
I just want to know if I should run it down and will leaving it in with out using it hurt anything ?
no. there is no reason to deliberately “cycle” modern rechargeable batteries. This myth is a hold-over from the early days of a specific type of nickel-cadmium rechargeable cell which hasn’t been used for a long time now.
Lithium ion batteries have a high energy density for their size and they are lightweight as well. This makes them great for laptops and other portable devices.
Unfortunately, their longevity sucks. They start dying from the moment they are manufactured. It’s just a part of their chemistry. Cycling batteries helped increase the longevity of nickel-cadmium batteries, but it doesn’t do much for lithium ion batteries.
Lithium ion batteries really don’t care all that much about how you treat them, at least as far as charging and discharging goes. However, one important factor in their longevity, which is especially important in laptops, is heat. Laptops by their nature tend to run hot, and heat kills lithium ion batteries. Laptop batteries rarely last more than a few years as a result.
Just leaving the battery in the laptop won’t hurt it from a charging/discharging point of view, but depending on how hot your laptop gets, and more importantly, how hot the battery itself gets, the heat might easily kill it.
My battery went out on my Dell Latitude 531. I plugged it in when I bought it, and never unplugged it. Now, with the dead battery still in, I get “92% available (plugged in, not charging”. That number, over a few weeks, has gradually declined form 95%. What happens when that number gets down to critical, and what number will that be? What is it telling me – 92% of what?
If I unplug, even for a second, everything goes dark, LED, mouse, everything.
AFAIK most charge controllers just look at the cell voltage to determine state of charge. The battery management IC might “see” that % of “fully charged” cell voltage with the power supply connected, but the cells aren’t actually able to store any charge.
I used a Dell Latitude D630 laptop as a work PC that had a dead battery. I needed a portable PC but only used it near an outlet (in an office setting). I ended up just taking the battery out and not replacing it. It ran just fine and was lighter than one with a battery.
In my experience most laptops will function fine as long as they have some valid power source.
What is the basis for these facts?
Some googling got me this:
Table 3, specifically. They say 40% charge, I said 50%. Point is you don’t want to do long term storage at a high or low state of charge, and you want it cold.
Thanks for this.