Should I discharge my laptop battery completely?

I’ve recently been talking about this with people: that apparently with lithium batteries, it’s good to let them completely empty of charge before you plug it back in. I’ve switched over to this approach, but am curious about other people’s results. Thanks in advance!


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This entry was written by enjoying autumn, posted on June 16, 2009 at 9:46 pm.

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6 Comments

  1. ArfArfArf
    Posted June 16, 2009 at 11:10 pm | Permalink

    I’ve heard exactly the opposite. That draining is good for NiMH batteries, but very bad for Lithium Ion. Not sure about Lithium Hydride.

  2. playing a lot of chess
    Posted June 17, 2009 at 3:10 pm | Permalink

    I guess I don’t know that much about batteries… not even sure what kind I have or how I would find out. Nevermind what the differences are!

  3. Russellji
    Posted June 18, 2009 at 6:20 am | Permalink

    I have just purchased a Toshiba with Lithium Ion battery and the manual suggests:-

    “To maximise the life of the battery pack, at least once a month, …allow the battery pack to fully discharge.”

    Straight from the horses mouth…

  4. playing a lot of chess
    Posted June 18, 2009 at 8:06 am | Permalink

    So only once a month or multiple times a month?

  5. nitro2k01
    Posted June 18, 2009 at 12:38 pm | Permalink

    No need to let it discharge completely every time. Li-Ion batteries are not supposed to have those “memory effects”. I even think the Toshiba manual quoted above picked that quote out of their ass, or just never edited the manual when they upgraded the battery type about 10 years ago or so.

    ArfArfArf: Draining Li-Ion batteries completely is a bad thing, but that will typically never happen because the battery pack has an over/under charge protection circuit. So when draining the battery, from the computer’s point of view, you’re just at that lower limit.
    OT: When that protection circuit fails, the batteries may swell and leak, and in worse cases explode and/or catch fire. Every second year or so you see something about that in the news.

  6. playing a lot of chess
    Posted June 18, 2009 at 9:36 pm | Permalink

    Very informative response nitro, you get a gold star.

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