When to Calibrate Laptop Battery

Predicting how long a battery charge is going to last, is actually an impossible thing to do. This is because it actually depends on the habits and need of the laptop user. The rate of using your battery laptop determines the battery longevity. In case that your laptop battery's life became shorter, you can always try to calibrate it. In case that you observe that the battery does not last anymore as long as it used to, then you definitely need to consider calibrating it. And this is how you can do it:

• Fist, turn off the laptop and charge its battery: then, let it run until it is completely empty and the laptop shuts off. Once the battery is fully drained, you have to charge it again and, in case that it is necessary, restore the settings related to the power management. You can recalibrate the battery once a month.

• Always keep in mind that every time you wish to calibrate laptop battery, you have to charge the battery, discharge it and then fully charge it again. In order to do a proper recalibration, you need to have all the power-saving commands turned off. In case that the method is not working from the first time, you should retry it for few times.

Type of Laptops

When calibrating the battery, the type of laptop is very important. There are two different batteries presented by two types of laptops.

• The above-explained calibration method is workable for laptops that are using NI-MH cells.

• For those provided with Li-Ion batteries, any deep discharges might actually decrease the battery capacity and its lifespan. Even more, you should know that Li-Ion batteries lose about 20% from their initial capacity on every year. For this reason, in about five years, the batteries should be changed with new devices. If you wish to calibrate laptop battery presenting Li-Ion structures, you should definitely keep in mind that recharging it is not able to help you. The only method helping you to restore these types of batteries is to keep them charged at approximate 40% of their capacity even when they are not in use.

Besides the mentioned methods, some other systems such as IBM ThinkPad Battery MaxiMiser, Battery MaxiMiser Gauge or ThinkPad's Lithium Ion can help you in calibrating your laptop battery. All these programs are able to control and maximize your laptop battery usage.