Keeping Your Laptop Plugged in All the Time Will Kill Its Battery Faster

Why not just make batteries that can be plugged in all the time...?

Then every laptop manufacturer would lose out on the sale of all those unique, expensive batteries they're currently selling. They're about $100.00 USD a pop. That ain't chicken feed.

Smart phones will kill the laptop soon enough.

But not faster than gravity . . . !

As I understand it the number of charge/discharge cycles depends more on the chemistry of the batteries used than the charge level, although that does influence it to a degree.

LiFEPO4 is good for about 2k cycles

The other Li chemistries manage 200 - 300 cycles max. overcharging will reduce that, over discharging can kill them immediately depending on the level of discharge, HOWEVER any properly designed battery pack has built in over charge and over discharge protection, as well as cell balancing, and any properly designed charger will stop charging when the battery is just below its maximum capacity .... I design them using industry standard chips, and these features are built in to the chips .......

Given that no laptop or pad charger that I am aware of will indicate when the battery is 70% charged anyway to be able to implement his procedure ...... It appears to me that he is advocating that people cycle their batteries as much as possible to chew through the 200 - 300 available charge cycles as quickly as possible and therefore be buying new batteries or new laptops/pads etc as soon as possible to support the industry ....

Call me cynical if you like, but he has not convinced me!

On the other end of this scale are those who essentially never unplug their laptops. I regularly help people with laptop problems, and I've seen quite a few whose batteries failed with virtually no use. I have the impression that it is better to use the battery periodically than to just leave it plugged in all the time. This may have been more true in the days of NiCd, but it still seems to be the case.

If you want your battery to last, only plug the battery onto the Laptop when you need it and charge it up just before that.

Difficult if you suffer from brownouts and mains loss often, you just need to buy batteries each year.

Store the battery away from the Laptop with around 5-10% of capacity. Not fully charged.

I have Laptop batteries (and the Laptop) that I bought in 2006.

I have an old Win95 Laptop for some CNC work that must be more than 12 years old, exactly I cannot say, but it appears OK though I have not done a capacity test recently....like in the last 7 years or so. I charge it up to around 10% about once a year.

By the way, a charge cycle (one of the possible 2000!) is achieved even when the mains is only applied for a few seconds.....

The article compares keeping the battery on the charger versus recharging in terms of maximum number of charge/discharge cycles. My question is "How do you count charge/discharge cycles if the computer is left plugged in?" I would be more interested in the number of years the battery would last in each case.

This is heavily dependent upon many factors:-

How often the laptop is switched on.

The quality of the battery.

The quality of the charger.

The temperatures experienced by the battery at the same time as how heavy the charge is.

...and probably a great many other things that I have not mentioned or thought of!!

Its simpler to remove the battery from the Laptop and keep it at a minimum charge level by recharging it around 4 times a year, dependent upon chemistry and quality, more for low quality, less for good......