Laptop Battery Maintenance: Why has no one. . .

[DavidOsburn]

There a bazillion utilities out there to monitor your laptop battery capacity, remaining time and such. There are utilities available for iPhone, Droid phones and other devices to help deep-charge / cycle-charge batteries to aid in extending their life.

Why has no one built a utility that will cycle and maintain laptop batteries to aid in extending their life?

 

[Mike Connor]

There a bazillion utilities out there to monitor your laptop battery capacity, remaining time and such. There are utilities available for iPhone, Droid phones and other devices to help deep-charge / cycle-charge batteries to aid in extending their life.

Why has no one built a utility that will cycle and maintain laptop batteries to aid in extending their life?

There are plenty of such things. They are called battery chargers. It is not advisable, or even usually possible, to cycle accumulators when they are actually being used by the equipment they power, as that would render the equipment inoperable during the down cycle.

Regards....Mike Connor

 

[toughbook]

Some of your upper end laptop makers, and models have a battery recalibration utility installed. My panasonic Toughbook has one that I use about every other month. If you try to run it too often it will not allow you to do so since it is not the best thing to do often.
If I activate the software, it shuts down the OS, starts discharging mode, then it starts to recharge until full. You leave the screen open, if you touch the computer it will stop the process. It actually works pretty good. It gets my battery times dead on. When I have my Optical Bay battery installed as a 2nd battery the full discharge time can be over 14 hours! Nothing like a Toughbook 10 to 14 hours on both batteries, and that's with 1000Nit brightness.

 

[DavidOsburn]

Thanks for the info. As for the separate batery charger, I use lithium polymer batteries in some devices and they require very careful recharging. Most higher end device-independant chargers can handle multiple battery types including a laptop LiIon, but you have to find (or build) a connector - not real practical.

I saw the "recalabrators" but by the name I thought they just reprorammed the battery indicator to accommodate for natural degredation. I'll see if I can find one for my Dell.

 

[Mike Connor]

Thanks for the info. As for the separate batery charger, I use lithium polymer batteries in some devices and they require very careful recharging. Most higher end device-independant chargers can handle multiple battery types including a laptop LiIon, but you have to find (or build) a connector - not real practical.

I saw the "recalabrators" but by the name I thought they just reprorammed the battery indicator to accommodate for natural degredation. I'll see if I can find one for my Dell.

Indeed, that's why hardly any devices are equipped with suitable "Maintenance Chargers". It's just too expensive. You can buy some suitable chargers for all sorts of power cells or batteries, but the good ones are also rather expensive. Also, as a previous poster pointed out, "cycling" cells and batteries too often does not prolong their life, the reverse is the case.

There are one or two tricks with resistive loads to discharge cells/batteries, has to be done with care though;

Resistive Dummy Load Draws Constant Current From 1.2 To 50 V

Some more info;
Battery capacity calculator and method of calculating battery capacity - US Patent 6191559 Claims

Regards....Mike Connor

 

[Nemix]

MSI has one for their new line of Intel Sandy Bridge notebooks.

Download MSI FX620DX Notebook Battery Calibration Utility 1.0.1012.0301 Driver for Windows 7 / Windows 7 x64 - Softpedia

I just got the MSI FX620DX (on mail delivery).

I'm unsure but I think it's only for MSI branded laptops.

 

[DavidOsburn]

Good info, all. I am certainly no novice to computer maintenance, but I am no programmer and my harware skills have (albeit higher than average) limits. I routinely do the "Total Recall" approach, and have a created a unique power plan just to do this. But, even my dilligence is spotty and I am sure I do not succeed in a once-per-month recycle. My bigest problem is my wife's laptop (plugged in 90%).

BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY: Some one build a scripted utility that will temporarilly set all your power settings appropriately, drain the battery and recharge from some point below a minimum threshold. The ability to set a reliable (overnight) schedule would be a big plus. Must be simple enough for the completer dolt. . . . I mean novice.