How To Expand Your Laptop's Battery Life?

So you bought your brand new laptop which is equipped with all the latest features like Bluetooth, Wi-if, etc. That's great! The configuration serves you more than what you need and above all the laptop looks so cute. The size of the laptop makes it so handy, the keypad comes in your favorite color and everything looks so nice. You started working on your laptop and Gosh! There is a power-cut. But your laptop keeps on working by automatically switching itself to the plugged-in battery resource. You are happy. However, you prefer to check whether the battery is full or not by pointing your cursor to the battery icon. It is showing 99%. Good! But what you need to do to keep your battery showing the same storage levels even after two years? Read further to know the solution.

Lithium-ion Battery
Most of the laptops now a day are equipped with Lithium-ion batteries. Though there are Nickel-cadmium, Nickel metal hydride, etc, after the invention of Lithium-ion battery, because of its efficiency most of the laptop manufacturers are selling it along with their respective laptops.

Why Lithium-ion battery? Because it offers high energy density, runtime, and is light in weight. To run a power-sucking laptop, a battery with high energy density is required. The runtime of a laptop battery is based on what sort of applications you run. If you run basic applications for writing, reading, copying, chatting, etc, then your laptop battery runtime would be high compared to running a complex application that has a large number crunching requirement.

The Problem
The problem with the laptop battery arises when you start using your laptop as a Desktop Replacement. In other words, regularly using the laptop for extended hours (say 10/12 hours) on AC power along with the battery plugged-in. If you are using alternatively both the AC power and battery for long hours regularly, then there are so many chances that your battery life would go down. It is not because of your alternative usage with AC power, but by the heat that acquires generated by your laptop during its operation. The life of a battery is more dependent on the temperature rather than its regular charging and discharging functions.

On an average, a laptop battery (genuine!) would offer service for 1-1.5 years even if you use it roughly without taking any precautionary measures. You could extend your battery's life by more than 2 years if you follow the following said measures.

Precautionary Measures
The only solution to extend your laptop battery's precious lifetime is to use it only when you are in need of it. Means, if you have AC power available for your power requirements and you are using laptop as your Desktop Replacement, then remove the battery from your laptop after charging it moderately (40%), wrap it in a plastic cover, and store it in a cool place. After every 3 weeks, religiously, plug-in your battery into your laptop and charge it for sometime before you switch from your AC power to your battery. For the next few hours, allow you laptop to suck power from your battery until it acquires drained of all its stored power and shuts down you laptop. Then, plug-in the AC power into your laptop, start charging your battery up to a moderate level (say 40%), switch off your laptop to remove the battery and store it in a cool place after wrapping it in a plastic cover. You need to do this religiously for every 3 weeks in order to extend your laptop battery's life considerably by 2 more years.

Summary
In summary, a laptop battery is so costly and its life so precious that we cannot ignore the precautionary measures which makes it possible to extend its lifetime by 2 more years. That means, by following the above said measures, you could use your laptop battery for about 3 years on an average. Good Luck!