Yes. To get the best out of Lithium laptop batteries, the mains cable should only be attached until the battery is fully charged, then disconnected until there’s some proper charging to do again (so maybe after it drops to 50% capacity).
I don’t think this is the same as the widely-reputed ‘memory effect’ that other battery technologies may or may not have had, but rather that constant short charging cycles are more wearing on the battery than less frequent, larger ones.
Unfortunately, laptops-as-desktops in a corporate/office environment simply can’t always be used in a way that optimises battery longevity - if it’s attached to the manufacturer’s original docking station, it’s probably not possible to drop the mains power without losing some of the docking station’s features.
Well, you can put it in the refrigerator at about half-charge when you’re not using it and the loss of capacity can be reduced down to about 5%. Probably more feasible for a spare battery, but you CAN do something about it.
We get about 2-3 calls a week looking for refurbished/used laptops
Problem is, people are lookiong for something for $50-100. I have 2 on hand that are priced at $200 each, they are decent xp machines, but they have been sitting for months.
Interesting. Around here, they are $300+ for Windows 2000 level machines. In fact, until Walmart started selling eMachines, everyone I knew overpaid heavily for computers.
I made a few quid a while back buying old, but working laptops on eBay, installing a simple desktop linux distro on them and reselling them on eBay. Most of the trick was in reading the descriptions carefully so as to select machines that were bootable, but were just messed up in the OS, but the other bit of my trick (which I thought was quite clever) was to snipe auctions that were ending around about the evening rush hour on a weekday - seems like there was less competition around to bid against me at that time.
I never made more than pocket money out of it though, and the refurb work was only time-effective because I set the computers up on my test bench at work so I could set things installing and leave them to run.