Have you ever wondered why the rechargeable battery in your laptop is covered by a shorter warranty period than the rest of your laptop? The reason is very simple. The life span of a laptop battery is much shorter. After only one year many batteries provide half the capacity they had in the beginning.

What is the reason?

The reason is fairly simple. When having been turned off, the laptop wastes a little bit of energy of the battery. Almost for nothing. When turning on your laptop the battery gets recharged again. But even if it’s only 1% or 2% that needed to be recharged, this reloading process is counted as a whole recharging cycle. Thus after having turned on and off your laptop twice a day for a period of 365 days, the battery has undergone most likely more than 700 recharging cycles. And the more recharging cycles it has undergone the worse its capacity becomes.

What can I do about it?

Althought the performance will become worse after some time, there are certainly some things to try:

• If you use the laptop as a desktop PC substrate: you can remove the battery
• Reduce the amount of reloading cycles: have your battery used until it’s almost empty, then recharge

Some more hints

Remember, that Li-Ion batteries lose capacity even if they are not used at all. Some people reported losses in capacity of up to 50% in two years. So the impact of using or not using may be big or just little in your case. Anyway, it’s worth a try.