No matter how well you treat your laptop’s battery, it will eventually die. If you’re lucky, it will be time to replace your laptop by the time its battery dies. If you’re not, you’ll need to replace the battery.
Battery death can seem sudden, but it doesn’t have to. Windows will warn you when your battery reaches extremely low capacity levels, but you can also keep your own tabs on its capacity.
Lithium-ion batteries are common in consumer electronics. They are one of the most popular types of rechargeable batteries for portable electronics, with a high energy density, small memory effect, and only a slow loss of charge when not in use. Beyond consumer electronics, LIBs are also growing in popularity for military, battery electric vehicle and aerospace applications.
For example, lithium-ion batteries are becoming a common replacement for the lead acid batteries that have been used historically for golf carts and utility vehicles. Instead of heavy lead plates and acid electrolyte, the trend is to use lightweight lithium-ion battery packs that can provide the same voltage as lead-acid batteries, so no modification to the vehicle's drive system is required.
If you intend to purchase another battery, it's recommended that you do it only when the current battery is very degraded. If it's not the case, the non usage of a battery leads to its degradation.
If a spare battery is purchased and won't be used for a long time, the above storage method should be used.
Besides that, when purchasing a battery you must pay attention to the manufacturing date.
Besides, when using the battery, there's the possibility to suspend some Operating System features that help degrading the autonomy (only in Windows Vista or higher):
- Windows Aero, the theme that allows for visual effects like window transparency, requires graphics card acceleration, which obviously will help decreasing the battery lifetime;
- SuperFetch, ReadyBoost and SearchIndexer are three Windows Vista (and higher) services that, even in battery mode, are using the hard disk a lot and increase total power consumption, thus decreasing battery lifetime. Suspending these services has absolutely no negative impact on the performance or security of the system.
These features are resumed once the laptop is plugged in to A/C power.
