Written by Dr. Chow Yong Neng, at 2011-01-18
A couple of months ago, my son and I went to the local IT supplier to buy a replacement battery for my son’s laptop. We were advised that the replacement battery for the Dell Inspiron (which was bought over 4 years ago, ca. 2006) would cost over RM350 and that a generic model would set us back RM250. My son was “living” without the laptop-battery for a few months prior to this and suffered the inconvenience of tethering to the power cord.
Not a stranger to laptop battery issues, I was in fact hit by this when I received my first company laptop (an IBM Thinkpad that weighed close to 3 kg) back in 1998 …. the battery went dead 3 months after delivery. My second brush with dead laptop battery syndrome was in 2007 when my former employer’s IT specialist insisted on downgrading my specifications and “forced” my staff and I to use Acer laptops….2 of the 4 laptops had dead batteries within less than 2 months.
I have been trying to look for tips to ensure a longer lifespan for lithium ion battery, especially the expensive ones for laptops. An article that was published on 11 Jan 2021 in the Lifehacker gives a great and easy to understand account on the “how” and “why” your lithium ion battery behave under different conditions etc. and how you can prolong the lifespan of these batteries. The article also cited detailed scientific studies (which is not so easy to understand) from the Battery University for anyone who wants to study the matter in further details.
The take-home message is: if you want to have your lithium ion battery give you a long service, try to charge it at around 50% battery strength and to keep the battery under 30 degree C and do not overcharge the battery (i.e. do not charge it overnight).
On a brighter note, it seems to me anyway the advice given is more targeted at laptop batteries as my original Nokia mobile phone battery (shown at the bottom of the photograph) lasted me over 7 years and was only giving problems of fast discharge (and not even “dead” battery) recently. I cannot think of any scientifically logical reasons for this as I was accustomed to charging the phone overnight and only charge it when the battery indicated less than 2 out of 5 bars in strength. Perhaps the built quality of mobile phone’s original manufactured battery is somehow better than laptop batteries or it could be the demand of power from mobile phone is a lot less strenuous to the battery than that of the laptop?
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