How to control battery charging when computer is plugged-in?
The trouble with asking this sort of question is that there is no dependable source of data other than the individual experiences of individual users and their particular computer model & battery combinations.
It's like asking ten lawyers how many beans make five. You'll get at least twenty answers.
- I trust reports by individual users about their individual experiences.
- There is general MS guidance that advises charging your battery fully.
MS said:
Keep your PC plugged in until its fully charged.
I'm an "office laptop user". I always use my laptop in the office, and I've been using for the last 2 years. I work with my laptop plugged in. I've used my battery very rarely, maybe 4-5 days in the last 2 years.
The battery has always been charged at 100%, sometimes it lowered a bit and charged again to 100%. Now, after 2 years, I've a useless burned battery, it suddenly stoped working. I had to purchase a new one since I don't want to risk it explode inside my laptop.
For my part, I have been doing exactly the same as you for almost a decade. I have not experienced the problems that you have experienced.
- For two of my computers that rarely use their battery power these days, I leave the batteries in to charge fully then I just leave them in to stay that way. I have been doing this for at least five years.- Both batteries of both computers have lost less than 10%-20% of their charging capability during that time i.e. they have only degraded to about 80%-90% of their charging ability when they were brand new in 2015.
- All these batteries were the cheapest available at the time [I rarely bother with getting batteries from the computer maker].
- I generally swap batteries over every six months.
- For another computer that I treat in the same way, its battery still has 100% of its charging capability after its 4 years of use.- This was a computer maker's battery rather than a cheap third party one.
Battery charging circuits generally cut off when the battery is at the required state of charge [100% or whatever lesser charge you can set using the Bios / computer maker's utility /
]
- I can imagine that your battery might degrade if the charging circuit never cut off [but have no data to back this up]
- Did you ever notice the battery indicator showing charging at lower levels then not charging when it was showing 100%? That would demonstrate that the charging circuit was behaving as it ought to do so you need not have read this paragraph.
Few sources claim that there is any benefit to allowing Lion batteries to discharge completely.
- That precaution was common for battery technologies in use twenty years ago.
- The only recent advice I have seen like that is for the rechargeable Lion battery in my electric razor.- They state that I should discharge it completely every 6 months then recharge it fully.
- But there are many variants of Lion battery technology [both in terms of battery material & charging circuit control] so it is not possible to draw conclusions about computer batteries from their advice.
Do note that the 100% charge displayed in your Taskbar means "100% of what it is currently capable of" not 100% of what it was designed to be capable of. To find out what it is currently capable of, run a battery report and look through it to find the entries for Full charge capacity & Design capacity - the ratio of one to the other is a decent measure of how worn out the battery is***.
Code:
PowerCfg /batteryreport /output "D:\Desktop\BatteryReport.html" /Duration 1
But use the path to a convenient folder of your own in place of my D:\Desktop
You can repeat this as often as you like to find out how your new battery is behaving over time.
*** On my tablet-with-a-keyboard computer, Full charge capacity is bigger than Design capacity. This is nonsense and makes me think the maker is hiding something from me.
Denis
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