someone told this about laptop batteries

[Sean Moran]

I can only speak from my experiences with my netbook, but if I have the battery hooked up and not in use (netbook is off and not hooked up to AC), it loses the charge. I don't know if that's cuz it's keeping time or what, but I know it's consistent.

Thanks Charles. I only go off my memopry of desktop computers, and the little coin-shaped batteries that run thew CMOS on the motherboards when we shutdown, and that my Ubuntu Karmic has a laptop battery indicator to show when it is charging or discharging, and I have never seen it try to charge before when I boot up in the mornings, but maybe she just likes to keep some of her early-morning things to herself. So do I, so I won't complain about my laptop's morning habits.

[handy]

How many charging cycles? 1,000? After three years being used every day your laptop's hard disk would be dying, and the computer would be obsolete, so the replaceable battery is the least of your worries.

I don't want to buy notebook batteries. Hard drives are cheap & easy to replace. Obsolescence is in the mind of the beholder. We have a nearly 10 year old Powerbook here that has done an enormous amount of work, & it is still going strong, though its battery has been useless for a long time.

From the Apple site:

And thanks to advanced battery chemistry and adaptive charging technology, the MacBook battery can be recharged up to 1000 times — good for about five years of typical use — and lasts nearly three times the lifespan of typical notebook batteries.

I don't want to buy notebook batteries.

[CharlesA]

Heh, I'd rather just run it on AC power then have to buy a new battery, the damn things are expensive.

[73ckn797]

I have had several rechargeable batteries that would no longer take a charge that I wrapped up and left in a draw for 10 years. On a chance I plugged it into a charger and they took a charge and are working normally. These were batteries for cordless drills. I have not tried this with any laptop batteries.

[handy]

Heh, I'd rather just run it on AC power then have to buy a new battery, the damn things are expensive.

Obviously that's what we do.

Not only expensive, but due there being so many devices that use them, the resources are diminishing to the point where China wants to mine for some of them in ocean!

http://bluelivingideas.com/topics/ma...tional-waters/

[CharlesA]

Obviously that's what we do.

Not only expensive, but due there being so many devices that use them, the resources are diminishing to the point where China wants to mine for some of them in ocean!

http://bluelivingideas.com/topics/ma...tional-waters/

D'oh!

I really wish we'd all move onto renewable sources of fuel/power production/storage.

[stefangr1]

D'oh!

I really wish we'd all move onto renewable sources of fuel/power production/storage.

I'd like to propose a small nuclear fuel cell, such that you'd never need an external energy source.

[3rdalbum]

I think we need the Mythbusters to bust some myths about batteries. You can pretty much charge Li-ion batteries as you please without hurting them. The "storing batteries while flat damages them" is probably true, although it's actually the recharging after the deep discharging that damages the batteries.

The "memory effect" doesn't actually exist. It's a myth. Some people observed that, if they partly discharged their AA cells and then put them into a "dumb" recharger that works from a timer, then the cells would appear to lose capacity. However it wasn't a "memory effect", it was that the cells would get overcharged and start venting electrolyte. If you recharged the cells by the amount that they had been discharged, you wouldn't get a problem.

Modern batteries that you find in CE are usually controlled by smart charging circuits, not dumb timers. Thus, no overcharging.

[madjr]

if you have 2 batteries, exchange them every week and let the other one rest.

[jdong]

Again, the charge controller prevents overcharging, but the problem with running a laptop all the time with AC power is the heat! I've seen some pretty frightening laptop designs that place the battery pretty close to either the power supply or the CPU/GPU, and those batteries are being subjected to temperatures well over 70 degrees C whenever the laptop's on. That's going to kill you battery.