Calibrating Laptop's Battery?

Status
Not open for further replies.

sneak3

Distinguished
Sep 15, 2010
38
0
18,530
Hello.

I have a macbook pro, one netbook and 1 laptop from another brand. They are all recent stuff, with that Li battery.

So my question is: can I calibrate my all my batteries, included the ones from the laptop and netbook, the same way Apple recomends for the macbook???

Or there's a certain way depending on the brand?

Cause it is very clear how to do it in apples site, so it would be fine to do the same with all my mobile stuff
 

sideshowbob32

Distinguished
Sep 30, 2010
60
0
18,640
The only reason I say it wont make much of a difference is it is all ready calibrated it calibrates its self all the time with the bios on the mother board so your most likely all ready optimized. I assume your doing this because you need more battery life with your netbook or laptop how old are they you might want to consider replacing the battery with a new one maybe buy one off Amazon I replace the one in m netbook after it was a year and a half went from 2 and a half hours to 5 hours of battery life
 
Can't speak to the specific brand / model but those brands with which I have experience, state that to calibrate the battery meter, run the battery to completely dead condition once a month....I do it quarterly.

You'll see some who will argue this advice by confiding it with the standard advice that says to avoid running your battery down all the way because this "wears it out". This is true. However it's also true that the charging circuit controls charging rate based upon where it "thinks" the fully discharged level is. This is a moving target as the battery ages it's capacity lessens. The charging scheme applies a higher voltage in the initial staged and then ramps it down as it n ears a full charge. When uncalibrated, this is "off the mark" and also affects battery life.

So no, you do not want to run your battery down to it's fully discharged point every frequently as this will definitely reduce life. However, you also do not want your charging system to be misapplying voltages from being out of calibration.

Running the battery down to its fully discharged condition quarterly provides a good balance between reducing wear due to full drain and reducing wear due to mischarging.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.