On 22-Feb-09 10:42:09, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Sun, 2009-02-22 at 09:44 +0000, Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk wrote:
It is, of course, known that it's good for battery life to submit it to a discharge/recharge cycle every so often; but I've not heard of this being built-in to laptops' power monitoring. (But then there's a lot of stuff I haven't heard of).
This is only true for specific battery chemistries. Specifically NiCd and NiMH.
Lithium Polymer and Lithium Iron don't need a full charge-discharge cycle because they don't suffer "memory effects". The only care these cells need is that you avoid storing them below 30% charge and avoid heavy charge/discharge cycles in freezing temperatures .
However the battery monitor stuff that tells you percent discharge, runtime etc does require calibration every so often and I know that some Thinkpads at least will eventually perform an automated cycle to recalibrate if left on Mains for a log period of time.
Thanks for the clarification about battery cycling needs and recalibration, Wayne.
Also for your info that Thinkpads, at least, will do this thing. It may well be, therefore, that the same applies to the Advent which I'm using -- it is many weeks since I last "ran it down", and when I inspected the connections when I noticed it doing the recharge, they seemed sound (nothing loose). Nice to know!
(My other worry, of course, was that the PS box might have had something go wrong with it).
Ted.
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