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.