Extend the life of your laptop battery

Sold a laptop this weekend and the thought came to mind on how to extend the life of your laptop battery.  Many times people will buy a used laptop and expect new battery life from a used battery.  Sorry, it's not going to happen.  

Whether you’re already in the market for a replacement battery or just concerned about the inevitable day when you will be, here are three things you should know:

1. Most laptop batteries start to fail in 1-2 years. This varies depending on your usage, of course, but the average laptop battery is good for around 400 recharges (a.k.a. cycles). After that, it starts to lose its capacity to hold a charge.

That’s why the battery that once gave you, say, 3-4 hours’ worth of runtime now peters out after just 1-2 hours. And after a few years, you might be lucky to get an even an hour.

2. You can extend the life of your current battery. If you use your laptop as your primary desktop PC, you may be wasting battery cycles by leaving it plugged in all the time.

The solution: pop the battery out until you actually need to go somewhere with your laptop. As long as the latter is plugged into an AC outlet, it doesn’t actually need the battery.

Trust me on this: I’ve seen fairly new batteries that could barely last half an hour, even though the laptop rarely went anywhere. When in doubt, pop it out.