Guidelines & Tips from IT: How to Care for Your Laptop’s Battery

Taking proper care of your laptop’s battery is important for ensuring your mobile machine can run as long as possible. We’ve rounded up the top tips for how to care for your laptop’s battery, from how long you should leave it plugged into how low you should let the battery drain.

Save cycles, save your battery

• All laptop batteries are built to handle a certain number of charge cycles, usually somewhere around 500 full cycles — and sometimes even more. 
• Essentially, a charge cycle equals one full discharge down to 0% and then a recharge back up to 100%. 
• A discharge down to 50% and then back to 100% would equal half a cycle. 
• Over time, each charge cycle decreases a battery’s capacity from its design
• specifications, meaning that the fewer times you drain it, the longer the battery lasts.

Keep It Between 40 and 80 Percent Charge

• If you use your laptop away from its charger quite often, try to keep it above 40 percent charge. 
• When it’s time to recharge it, top it off to about 80 percent if it has decent capacity and you can live with the uncertainty. 
• Using it this way is the best and most obvious way to extend the longevity and charge capacity of your laptop. 

Leave it plugged in (but not all the time)

• If you’re not moving around and running an intensive application, it’s a good idea to leave your laptop plugged for the duration of that time. 
• If you’re handling day-to-day tasks that don’t consume as much power as quickly — like browsing the internet — you can rely on the battery alone.

Update your operating system

• For optimal functionality, you must consistently update your computer’s software. 
• When the manufacturer releases a new update, it not only has patches and upgrades but can also help programs run more efficiently, which will conserve battery power. 
• The same operating system on a later patch could use significantly less battery power, giving your battery a longer lifespan without changing anything else. 
• And so, review your OS and keep your machine — and its battery — on a healthy diet of updates.

It’s always surprising to find out how much longer you’ll want to keep your perfectly set-up laptop once its battery life is a known thing, not a complete mystery.