Yesterday I got a new Toshiba notebook computer. It’s lighter and faster, the hard drive holds four times as much data, and the factory installed RAM (4.0) is twice what I have in the old notebook.
I’m still in the process of setting up the software I use, but so far it’s been a dream machine. Best of all is the battery. The battery life indicator promises about four and a half-hours of use, although that obviously depends on the load being placed on it. Still, I’ve been running on battery power now for about 20 minutes, using a cooling pad as well as the computer itself, and I’ve only used a few percent of its stored up power. The battery life in my old HP laptop would be half gone by now, especially if I used the cooling pad with the computer. I’m still pinching myself, because now the use of my computer when away from home is no longer contingent on finding a seat next to an electrical outlet.
The question I ask now–and the reason I have put this in GQ–is whether there is anything I should or should not be doing now, while the computer and battery are new, to ensure that the battery continues to perform well?
There are several sites on the web that address this. Depends on what you battery usage is going to normally be, exactly what kind of battery it is and stuff and such.
The thing that most interested me was that it should be stored in a partially discharged state.
What I have found it that under normal in house use, I pull the battery just enough to disconnect it and use a battery back up with the straight A/C from the wall. That keeps it from being constantly charged and bouncing at the top of the charge state. (More important for different kinds of batteries.) Keeps the use cycles low and when I do use the batter, I try to run it down real low before charging to keep the cycles low, thus getting longer over all battery life.
Should be some info in your book that came with the computer I would think.
YMMV
I believe it is Li-ion, but it’s not telling me from the system itself. The materials that came with the notebook don’t really give you any definite dos or don’ts, so I suppose there isn’t much to worry about. And until I got this computer yesterday, I never did worry much about batteries, because they usually seemed to have so short a useful discharge cycle as to be nearly worthless.
As for giving hints for prolonging battery life, or advising the user how not to shorten it, it’s my experience with computers and software generally that vendors prefer to emphasize what you can do with the product rather than what you can’t do.
BTW Fantome thanks for the link. I was looking for that.