Heathernet Help Desk: Laptop Batteries

Posted by Heath on November 23rd, 2008 @ 8:52 pm, filed in Apple, Help Desk, Tech

Most college grads of these outrageous aughts have come to know the distress that comes with our laptop’s lithium ion battery calling it a good run before even a good two or three years of school is run off of our machine. Not only is it frustrating for the many of us who have made the Apple switch, it quickly becomes unfairly expensive. This leads us to proudly declaring that our machine “just works,” and then add, “when we plug it in.” My computer is four years old and begging for it’s third new battery to take drinks from. Um, hey, I leave the “electronic device that incurs a regular cost to use” job to my iPhone, thanks. 

In the past this has led me to search for a solution and I’ve also given some quasi-flawed advice on the topic. Read on for my update on the problem:

Lithium ion rechargeables are found in gobs of our electronics now, essentially in anything with a bolted in battery or a large detachable battery pack. These guys are fussy animals. They like to have their electric juices kept busy. If they’re operating the device on their own, slowly using power, they like that; it’s their job. If they’re being charged back up from some heavy use, that’s great, too. It’s good to remind them who they are with a full discharge every once in a while, but like chocolate cake, it’s not therapy to be prescribed every day. Finally, they don’t like being parked inside a hot computer fully charged and still plugged in. Under these conditions (in addition to regular use) they will slowly die.

I use(d) my laptop like many youths on the educational go do: Parked it at a desk where it’s easy to use for weeks at a time, rarely shutting it down and keeping it plugged in. Then when it came time to meet somewhere off the plug, like the library or the coffee shop or the Adirondacks, the battery would only cough up an hour or two hours of use before it was back on the sweet nectar of American AC/DC. 

My work-around, and the advice I’ve given to many, had been to use the battery only when you need it. Throw it in your desk drawer while your computer is a desktop and throw in the fully charged brick when you needed to go rogue. When you did go untethered knock your screen down to as dim as you can stand. I used to be able to coax six hours of productivity out of that practice.

Well, not so fast.

You can still take screen dimming strategy as gospel truth in the world of laptops, but those batteries I told you to take out? Ya’ll better cram them back in. Turns out intel driven notebooks are specifically designed to run slower without a battery inside… in case that YouTube binge you go on momentarily pushes the power draw of your computer past what the wall outlet was providing. Highly unlikely, but without the big battery to fall back on such an outage would attack the other tiny battery in your computer. Oh, what other battery? You know how your computer knows what time it is when you turn it on? Well, that isn’t elf magic. Anyone who has an old laptop with a burnt out hardwired battery knows the funny time warp that happens when the dog pulls out the power chord of their battery-less computer.

Going battery commando is an imperfect practice and I hereby un-recommend it. Between having a computer run slow and having a computer that has to stay plugged in I think the smart choice is the better running computer.

So what’s my replacement advice? From Apple’s battery support page it’s clear that there isn’t good advice for those of who are cramming both the need of having a computer that’s transportable and the need of just simply having a computer at all into one machine. We all use our laptops as our everything and many of us went in to debt just to achieve that much. Sorry Apple, but we can’t “[not] plan on using [our] notebook[s] for more than six months.” 

There’s no real prescribed method here but I would suggest trying as best you can to use your new notebook like you do your cell phone or iPod. They’ve got the same battery guts inside and the practice of charging it at night while you use most of it’s power during the day is serving those devices well. To those of us with dead batteries in our old laptops it’s probably time to hang up the cleats and call it a desktop or make an offering to the Apple god’s for a new battery. Update: If you do end up springing for a new battery, save it, and only use it when you’re traveling. Leave your old battery in there and squeeze every last ounce of life out of it when you’re in desktop mode. That way you don’t sacrifice performance or battery life.

Or, win a million dollars.

(The Heathernet does not endorse or condone money as the solution to all problems.)