How to Charge my new Dell Inspiron 17 5000

[klipschthxpromedia]

Hello Everybody, Just got a brand new Dell Inspiron Laptop.

I have done a lot of research and this is what I have been thinking that maybe would work with charging/discharging my laptops battery.

Method-

1) Charge the battery to 100%

2) Run it from the wall when there is a outlet within reach

3) Disconnect the power from the wall when not using the laptop

4) Drain the battery down to 15% and charge it back up to 100% once a week

Do you think this would work alright for maintaining the battery?
Do you feel any of this is unnecessary and why?

Thanks

 

[Slumy__57]

I'm gonna start off by saying that most of this is overkill, but if you like going overboard for a little more battery life, all the power to you.

So there are a few key things to do when it comes to maintaining a battery. The first and most important, is to completely deplete the battery during the first use before charging it up, and to get it up to 100% the first time you do charge it.

After this, you just wanna use as few full charge cycles as possible. Batteries wear out either from sitting too long without use, or from too many charge cycles. If you are using the laptop pretty often, then you will only have to worry about the latter. So keep it plugged in as often as possible, and try to save power as much as you can when you are on battery. Here's a good article on laptop battery maintenance that you may want to look at:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-to-care-for-your-laptops-battery/

IMO though, all of this is kind of overkill. I have owned many laptops both for my personal use, and for work, and I've never really done anything special to/for my batteries. You'll have to replace them at some point if you hang on to the laptop for long enough, and I don't find it to be worth all this extra effort to spare yourself from a $50 battery replacement. I just replaced a battery on my Macbook Pro, which is one of the worst laptops to work on, and it was still a pretty easy process, and only cost me 35 bucks. In my book, that's easier than going out of my way to perfectly care for my battery just to extend its overall life a few months.

 

[EvilHamster]

One thing you should also consider, is that you might be talking about calibrating a battery.

A battery pack has a small chip in it, that tells the PC how much juice is left. Since it can not measure the battery, it only guesses based on previous full/empty information (which it can measure). As such, a battery can be uncalibrated, leading to the chip thinking there is less charge left than it is. The methods you describe usually fix this. BUT the thing about calibration is that it does not really affect the battery health.

As in, if you calibrated it every day vs. if you had not calibrated it at all for a year and than calibrated, the battery would take equal charge and work just as well, once calibrated properly.

Now, I am no battery expert, so there might actually be more to what you wrote, and it might actually make it last longer. But my first instinct would be that not charging it past 90-95% and making sure it does not sit in the sun all day, will make it last longer than that. Plus, not sure if it is worth all the effort.

Cheers.