No matter if your laptop is new or if you have had it for a while, with these 7 tips to take care of your laptop’s battery you will be able to preserve this component and maintain its useful life as long as possible.
The 7 tips to take care of your laptop battery
Let’s take a look at the tips to take care of a laptop battery:
Check your health regularly
The first thing would be to know how well it is healthy. Even if your laptop is new, this information never hurts. You can find out the battery life (Spanish) by means of the Windows CMD command, or by making use of a free program like Ampere. In this link we explain in detail about the subject.
If you check its health regularly, you will be able to see the progress of the battery degradation (because degradation is inevitable) and keep track of it; the goal is that with these tips, it progresses as slowly as possible.
Avoid high temperatures as much as possible
In itself, our first piece of advice is not to expose your battery (and laptop) to high temperatures. The lithium batteries of laptops and smartphones (both ion or polymer) degrade voraciously if they work in temperatures exceeding 40°.
Whenever possible, use your laptop in a well-conditioned place. To know the battery temperature, you can use programs such as HWMonitor. In addition, it also allows you to know the design capacity and the current maximum capacity of the battery, and by comparing them you can see how much this component has been degraded.
Keep its charge between 20 and 80%.
This applies to cell phones and also to laptops. Experts recommend (Spanish) keeping the charge between 20 and 80% so that the battery is not subjected to high voltages, thus extending its useful life.
However, they also say that it doesn’t matter if you let it charge up to 100%, because the electrical flow will stop automatically to avoid overcharging. So, they advise that you should rather evaluate your conditions of use: Do you have a plug available all the time or do you spend your time moving from place to place? Then you will know what maximum percentage is best for you.
Set a maximum battery charge limit
Also, in the above link the experts also advise that, if you do not want to reach 100% but you do want or need to leave the charger connected, then set a maximum charge limit on the laptop. In this way, you can program the battery to stop charging when it reaches, for example, 80%.
Keep only the programs you are using open
The less processes or programs that are running, the less the battery will be consumed. And the slower it discharges, the fewer charge cycles we will do in a day, which by the way we should try not to exceed one cycle per day.
Maybe it can be a little difficult, but as long as you have open only what you are using, you will help a lot to save battery consumption. Oh, and use Windows Task Manager to close programs that are running in the background.
We would also like to take this opportunity to tell you to keep the brightness level as low as comfortable for you, in order to contribute to the saving and efficient use of the battery.
Do not connect and disconnect it to the plug frequently.
That is, respect each charging cycle: If it is at 20%, charge it up to 80% and then unplug it. You use it up to 20% and then plug it in. Whenever possible, do it this way. This way you avoid accelerating its degradation, as it would happen if you connect and disconnect it every few minutes.
When playing games, it would be better to remove the battery
Running video games generates high processor performance and high battery consumption. Basically it would discharge very fast, but more than that, it could overheat thanks to the heat generated by the processor and other components… Not to mention whether or not you will use it in a poorly conditioned place.
For all these reasons, it is recommended that when you play you remove the battery so that it is not affected, and plug the laptop to the electric current. When you finish, you put it back on again. Now, if your laptop is one of those with an integrated battery, then the best thing to do is to use, if it is within your possibilities, a cooling base.
Those would be the 7 tips to properly take care of a laptop battery, although we would like to mention others, such as leaving the battery at 60% if you are not going to use it for more than a few weeks and using the power saving mode if you will be doing undemanding tasks.
