It was only supposed to charge until 8pm however I went to sleep and forgot about unplugging the laptop.
Has this damaged or decreased my laptop's battery life?
PS: it is a new toshiba u840w and it sleeps after 10 mins of inactivity.
Can overcharging decrease laptop battery life?
MasterNoob on 12/07/2013 - 16:06
Comments
how long can the battery go without a charge when you first used it, compared to right now?
never checks haha the notebook is already 2.5years old.
You wouldn't get more than 10 minutes now I reckon
You mean 24/365
You mean you've never unplugged/moved your laptop? Is it on an extension cord?
Why not use a PC with 21inch monitor ?If you have it plugged in 24/7 what you should do is run the battery flat first then just remove the battery and let it run off mains power to keep the battery healthy.
Except to 40% not flat. And then it will cut out if the power goes off. Why not just leave it in?
Heat will shorten the battery life.
all laptops intelligently charge the battery, it's impossible to over charge it. Most laptops stay plugged in 24/7.
But if a battery is overcharged somehow, generally it does shorten their life.
This. Any effect it might have will be very small. I only ever disconnect my laptop when moving.
Nah laptops have electronics that monitor the charging and turn off current to the batteries when they are full. If they didn't have that owners would be disgusted with the battery life, electricity consumption and heat generated.
mine's a pretty old laptop and i used to leave it on charge for hours at a time so now the battery lasts around 15 minutes at the most
It probably doesn't have the battery monitor thing mentioned above :(
Nah all rechargeable batteries die eventually. I have to get a new one for my netbook, it barely holds a charge and the power supply is running hot so all the current is getting turned into heat in the battery.
Yes it can, cycle the battery occaisonally will avoid it.
Also all laptops dont have built in smart charging, the more expensive or better brands will, in addition check the battery settings and you will find you have a few choices depending how you charge the battery.
In some configurations the smart circuitry is part of the battery pack.
Thanks for the replies! :)
Also, I am having difficulty finding the right neoprene sleeve for the toshiba u840w due to its unusual shape. I have found one sleeve that fits the length but the width is quite big so would it still offer my laptop protection ? I really don't want to spend a total of $64 on toshiba's official sleeve for the u840w… http://www.shoptoshiba.com.au//p-6191-toshiba-executive-slip…
If your bedtime is before 8pm, you shouldn't be allowed a laptop yet.
My laptop was on 24/365 too, but when I needed to take it off the charger, I found that the battery's stuffed. It was around 3-4 hours when brand new, and 2 hours when I last checked around a year ago, but then last week when I needed the battery, I only got 20 mins of juice from a full charge.
I've got a Lenovo E320 and I make a habit of removing the battery when I'm using it at home. Battery only goes into the laptop whenever I go out and use it outside.
1.5 years old now and the battery stats say the battery has only gone thru 40 discharge cycles.
There is some justification for removing the battery if you are using the laptop for long periods on mains and that is the heat from the electronics is not good for it. But do top up the battery now and then; it's not good to let it go flat.
Overcharging any battery that isn't designed for it can reduce the lifespan of the battery and even kill it eventually. The only laptops I've seen that you can leave on charge for extended periods of time are Ultrabooks, but even then to keep the battery going it's recommended to charge it up everytime it goes down to about 20-30% and only let it discharge every 1-3 months. People who are saying laptops have technology to prevent overcharging aren't technically wrong but they use a specific type of battery (I've forgotten the name of it to) it's not normally a design in the laptop itself.
so whats the best way to deal with battery life? is it like most electronic devices? if u dont use it for a year or 5 then suddenly use it then its bound to have problems?
I wonder whats the best way to maximize the life of one if u dont use it much? Charge it once a week? 2 weeks ? and when its fully charged remove it from the pc?
Calmerancer - it seems to be my role in battery related threads on OzBargain to be some sort of cat among the pigeons most of the time , so here I am again for some more wretched feather flying. This will also serve as a response to others above.
Lithium batteries are in many respects, wonderful things. Lightweight, energy dense - and to answer your first question - don't have anywhere near the lethargy-through-infrequent-use issue that other types of rechargeables have.
Despite an apparent spike in fires overseas recently relating to some poorly manufactured laptop batteries - that's the extent in reference to lithium battery safety issues I'll make in this thread.
What I will reference is the real rub with lithium batteries that everybody ends up experiencing, but few quite understand. Brace yourself, because I know that everbody likes a fully charged battery.
Lithium batteries that are maintained at 100% charge suffer a PERMANENT capacity loss of 20% per year at regular ambient temperatures. Sadly, there is a not-much-less-gruesome sliding scale (maintained charge level v permanent capacity loss) beyond that. Depth-of-disharge percentages v permanent loss are gruesome too. With lithiums - if you're in the habit of anywhere near to flattening your battery - don't!
The above two extremes, and not-so-extremes, more than number of charge cycles incurred, are the real reasons most people notice their mobile phone / laptop battery is not what it once was - most often well before the first year is out.Calmerancer, to answer your second question really succinctly - if you want to store a lithium battery for a long time and preserve it, discharge to no more than 40% of capacity, seal it in a plastic bag and put it in the fridge! At 40% charge and 0°C you'll only lose about 2% potential capacity per year.
Did that help?
You asked…!!
For the benefit of those leaving laptops plugged-in most most of the time, some brands have installed 'desktop usage' type programs that can maintain battery charge level at lower than 100%. Typically between 70 and 80%. From memory, some go even lower.
I presume user-selectable percentage third-party battery management programs exist. I'll let somebody else find them. I'm going to bed!For anybody with a recent Lenovo laptop - Lenovo's energy management software (version 6.0) allows 45 to 50% charge level maintenance.
Whatever brand you have - check to see what you have installed. There may well be something already there that will prolong you battery life - even if only a bit - if you're in the habit of leaving your laptop plugged in.Gelf54 - it stood to reason that there would be another thread on this subject on OzBargain. Could've saved a bit of sleepy typing.
I thought the Battery Maintenance program has been there for a while. I usually set to Custom charge threshold between 50% and 95% so it will not attempt to recharge if I just use for a few minutes unplugged.
Earlier versions of the program didn't have custom settings and only allowed an 80% (or thereabouts) charge level to be maintained.
My understanding is that modern day electronics have intelligent charging circuits so batteries cannot be over charged. I believe overcharging can have serious ramifications to the longevity and stability (ie think flammable).
They say leaving a notebook always plugged in the battery slowly discharges but then continually gets topped up so it effectively wears the battery down every so slightly.
For what you are talking about leaving the notebook on the charger for a day, the effects would be negligible.Looking up at what tas wrote, this is similar to what we do for remote control car batteries (which are LiPo's not LiIon's like most electrical equipment). But practically speaking leaving your notebook at 40% charge may not make a lot of sense.
Mangoman, it's not just devices that contain protection circuitry - lithium packs themselves these days contain protection chips. Only dodgy manufacturing + other failures will result in 'dangerous' overcharging (yes, sometimes with bonus fire).
As regards the things you said in your second paragraph, depth of discharge is only part of the equation. As illogical as it sounds, even charging a lithium ion (or polymer) battery once to 4.2 volts (100%) shortens its life significantly.
This is OzBargain. If you want to save money (and that may - depending on your usage pattern - mean the initial expense of buying a second battery, plus the hassle of swapping it over during the course of a day), then not charging the batteries much above 80%, and not discharging below 30% will give you some practical runtime, and WILL save you money in the long run. Or drive you insane. Maybe both!
This whole topic is a well known myth by created by users of the dark side of the force. Use the force MasterNoob, the force is there so plug in.
Jeez - so many comments, but not much research form a lot of people. I see a few good and correct comments, but this is what I know.
OK, so pretty much every laptop/smartphone/tablet uses a battery made of Lithium Ion. This is important. Before this we had Nickel Metal Hydride batteries, or some other mix of battery compounds.
BEFORE the Li-Ion batteries of today, there was a phenomenon that was termed "battery memory". Basically if you would charge the battery BEFORE it was empty or nearly empty, the battery would not fully charge. The more times you did this the worse it got. Back in the mid 90s to early 2000s, we use to see this problem prominently in our work. Our technicians would dock their laptops for use here, then head out to site for an hour or two on battery, come back, and dock the unit again. Because the battery was not completely empty when it came back, we'd see this a lot. We literally had batteries not 6 months old last 15-30 minutes after a while. We COULD sometimes save the batteries by doing a FULL battery run-down and recharge cycle (repeated a few times), but generally they never lasted long. THIS IS WHY you've been recommended to completely deplete the battery. DO NOT DO THIS!!!
Although some safety measures are in place, generally if you battery is of the Li-Ion type (anything in the last almost decade), then completely depleting the battery has MORE risk now, as you can collapse the battery. This tends to happen more in handset (smaller) Li-Ion batteries but once the battery collapses it is dead. Hence a lot of instructions tell you not to deplete the battery to below 4%-7%. Again, please DO NOT deplete Li-Ion batteries.
Li-Ion DOES NOT have a "battery memory". The ONLY thing that shortens it's life is the amount of recharge cycles. The more times you put it on charge, you take a little bit of it's life. So it is in fact, a GOOD idea to just leave it on the charger, and NOT use the battery at all if you do not have to.
When you leave it on charge, you DO NOT overcharge the battery. I saw someone mention only ultrabooks or high end notebooks have circuitry to prevent this. This is simply not true. I have yet to see a laptop made in the last 5-10 years that doesn't have this circuitry. In fact, next time you're on charge, hover your mouse over your power icon in the bottom right of the screen, once the battery is full, it will tell you something like "98% available (plugged in, not charging)".
This circuitry is like a #1 design that power hardware engineers put in to protect battery life.
So, just leave the thing plugged in, run it on battery as little as you need, and it will last the longest.
Oh, HEAT DOES affect battery life, but it is temporary while the battery is hot. A battery power cycle will last a LOT shorter if the battery is hot. Do not leave your laptop running in the hot sun in other words.
The ONLY thing that shortens it's(sic) life is the amount of recharge cycles.
Simply, WRONG.
Depth of discharge, maximum charge level, and yes, heat - be it in use or in stasis, are all intrinsic lithium ion/polymer battery life shorteners, and none minor in their contribution to that.
Oh, I forgot.
Hopefully these 2000x more powerful Li-Ion batteries that recharge 1000x faster will soon be here:
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/153614-new-lithium-ion-…
its about time we had some leap in battery tech actually, hopefully this happens sooner than later
Even I can't argue with that point…
Tas has summed it up well. When looking up articles on battery charging, any information older than a few years should be taken with a grain of salt because we have gone through several battery chemistries: NiCD, NiMH, LiIon, LiPo. NiCd is the chemistry with the memory effect. I remember huge flaming debates on Usenet on whether it really existed. But that argument is moot now.
Charge limiting is definitely built into laptops or the battery pack, otherwise the batteries will be ruined in short order. You could take the battery out to spare it a little ambient heat when running on mains, but if you kick the power cord you lose your work. Me, I'd just leave it plugged in. Just don't let the battery run down for a long time, that's one thing everybody agrees is bad. And your battery will not last forever, even if you don't use it much.
Thanks gp. I should probably confess at this point that I have a number of lithium driven gadgets (tabs, bluetooth speakers, and other things too come to think of it) that are left plugged into their chargers more often than not, but mainly because their particular battery life - be it in-use or ultimate - is not critical to me.
Knowledge, however, is power - and potentially a specific type of power for somebody who really, really, wants - or needs, to preserve the battery life in their laptop or other gadget.
So long as the battery pack did not get warm you will have not have substantially reduced the battery life of the laptop.
Heat is the killer of the rechargable battery.I leave all my laptops plugged in permanently and it does reduce battery capacity over time.
i have my acer notebk plugged in 24/7 for a year.