The advice is actually not complete baloney. Complete charge/discharge cycles might restore some of the battery’s capacity (the word “might” is important in that sentence). I would expect that most likely you’ll see some improvement, but you definitely will not restore the battery capacity to what it was when the battery was new.
Lithium ion batteries are lightweight and have good energy densities, which makes them great for laptops and cell phones and other portable devices. Unfortunately, lithium ion batteries also begin dying from the moment they are made, and to some degree you can’t stop them from dying an early death. Good weight, good energy density, horrible longevity.
Heat kills lithium ion batteries. This can be an issue in some laptops, as many laptops often run a bit hot (you can have it cool, you can have it fast, and you can have it small, but not all three at once) and some laptop designs are better than others at keeping the heat away from the battery. Keep the laptop away from external heat sources, and if you notice the desk getting hot under the laptop, you might want to consider one of those laptop cooling pads. Avoid using the laptop on your bed or on other cloth furniture where the heat can’t get out.
Many laptops these days also have a “battery saver mode” where they keep the battery down around 40 percent or so instead of constantly charging it fully. This can dramatically extend the life of the battery. This won’t help you recover capacity from an older battery, but if your wife gets a new laptop this is something to keep in mind. If you know you won’t be needing the battery at certain times, keep it in battery saver mode. Then fully charge it before meetings and such where you know you’ll need it.
Lithium ion batteries also do not do well if they get discharged too far. To prevent bad things from happening, the battery or the laptop will have a monitoring circuit built into them that will cause them to go into a dormant “sleep” mode if they get discharged too far. Sometimes there are issues with this circuit, which may be what SmartAleq is referring to with Ryobi battery packs. There are ways of recovering a battery that has gone dormant, but they probably aren’t the types of things you should do yourself unless you really know what you are doing.
In any event, I agree that someone is just trying to get out of replacing the battery, probably trying to save money. If the battery is down at half capacity, it probably needs replaced, and the charge/discharge/charge method, while not completely baloney and may help some, is not likely to recover enough capacity to get through long meetings.
It doesn’t hurt much to try it.
Here’s my guess: If the battery is currently at 50 percent capacity, you’ll recover it to about 60 percent capacity.
Tell your wife to contact IT and tell them that the laptop is no longer usable for its intended purpose since it won’t hold a charge, and they need to replace the laptop. Then they might be more willing to just buy her a battery instead. 