Laptop Batteries Guide
Good battery makes working with your laptop comfortable. Nobody likes power outages in the middle of work, especially if you don't have A/C adapter with you or basically you have no place to plug it in. To avoid such problems you have few choices. You can buy better, more capacious battery or you can have few batteries with you and change them if needed. Some laptops allow you to have two batteries installed. Usually you can put additional battery instead of CD-ROM or floppy drive, if your laptop has universal bay. For example Dell Latitude laptops support this feature.
Battery Maintenance
Battery lifetime is quite short, however it depends on how you are using your laptop. Efficiency of battery decreases with time. After a year of use its work time is noticeably shorter. Usually after 500 - 800 recharges battery does not hold a charge and needs to be replaced. This means about two years of typical usage. Because of this, if possible you should always use your A/C adapter to save the battery. If you are working at home or using your laptop in office, use A/C adapter. Of course it is not good for your battery to recharge it back if it is already 80% full. But working on A/C with 100% full battery connected is completely safe. On the other side, battery that lies down, not used at all, would also loose its capacity. If you use your laptop with A/C adapter, don't forget to recharge your battery once per two or three weeks.
Note About Used Equipment
When buying used or even refurbished laptop, you should take into account that battery might be on end of its life. Some resellers clearly say that they don't test battery when renewing a laptop. Most often their refurbished laptops come with no warranty on batteries. You shouldn't expect them to keep charge for more than one hour. Usually it is between 30 minutes and 1 hour. Even new laptops have much shorter warranty on battery than on the rest of hardware. If you are looking for cheap laptop you should consider buying new battery for it.
Few Things To Remember When Buying a Battery
There are few parameters that you should look at when buying a battery. The most important thing is battery type. It can be NiCad (Nickel Cadmium), NiMH (Nickel Metal Hybrid) or Li-Ion (Lithium Ion). Other thing is battery capacity. The more capacious battery, the longer work time. However, a lot depends on your laptop. The newest Centrino notebook would work longer on the same battery than traditional P4 desktop replacement laptop.
Battery Types
NiCad
These batteries are not often met nowadays. They offer relatively small capacity and contain heavy metals, which are environmentally unfriendly. They also require special treatment to avoid so called "memory effect". If you recharge NiCad battery, which is not fully discharged, its capacity will decrease very fast.
NiMH
NiMH batteries are a bit better than NiCad. They are not so vulnerable to "memory effect" and comparing to NiCad batteries, their capacity is twice as big. You can sometimes meet NiMH batteries in cheap refurbished laptops.
Li-Ion
Li-Ion is standard laptop battery type nowadays. They give you the same capacity as NiMH batteries with weight reduced as much as 40-45%. It makes your laptop a lot lighter and easy to carry around. But the most important factor that makes them so good is that they don't have "memory effect" at all. Because of this, they don't require special maintenance. Another good thing about them is that they do not contain any toxins or heavy metals.
Battery Capacity
Second important factor is battery capacity. It is measured in milliamp-hours (mAh). This value says, how capacious the battery is. 5000 mAh means that battery can drive 5000 mA current for one hour continuously. Older laptops used to have 2000mAh - 4000mAh batteries. Today laptops came with battery capacity of about 6000mAh and bigger. Of course the bigger this value is, the longer battery lifetime. However, battery work time depends on how you are using your laptop. Using hard drive or other drives like CD/DVD extensively discharges battery a lot. So wireless/ethernet devices do. You should avoid tasks like burning CDs if you want to work for long hours on your battery. Even screen brightness has influence on power usage. If your battery is almost discharged and you still need to work, try decreasing image brightness, turning off network devices and music. Some processors, like Pentium 4 Mobile, have special power-saving feature. It can slow down to 50% of normal speed, thus consuming much less energy. You should definitely enable power-saving options in Windows system. You can find them in Power Management in Control Panel. You can tell Windows to turn off HDD or screen after some time of inactivity.
What To Choose?
When buying a battery for your laptop, you can choose between new, refurbished or used one. We do not recommend used batteries because they come without warranty and you never now how long they would last. If you are looking for high quality product, get new battery. However you might also want to try refurbished one. These batteries are used, but renewed and tested by producer. Most often all cells are changed to new so they are almost like new instead they are cheaper. They also come with few months warranty.
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