Battery Exercise

[Sark79]

thanks folks, very interesting

[lazaroonie]

Quick bit of research and don't fully discharge your batteries ever if you can avoid it, this will more likely damage the battery as the different cells that make up the battery will run out of energy at different times and the other cells will reverse charge them (don't know what it is, but it sounds bad :p).

Also, one that I knew about, don't overcharge your battery, this will create a voltage depression and it will appear to not be holding as much charge. This is why I take the battery out sometimes (should all the time!) when on mains power. As it is always being trickle charged (and thus possibly overcharged) when it is plugged in.

this is also true for ipods - overcharging will kill your battery life

[RED-DOG]

Is there not an automatic cutout to prevent overcharging?

[doubleup]

Is there not an automatic cutout to prevent overcharging?

I suppose there "should" be, but certainly in my case overcharging is a reasonable explanation of my woes with batteries as neither of them were used anything like 1000 cycles.

[ifm]

My battery has never been any good, it lasts about 10 minutes but i think this was because the charger was faulty when i got it (it never powered the lappy properly, just kept topping it up meaning the battery was in constant use).
I need a new one anyway cuz i dropped it and broke the screen, it sits on my coffee table with my old monitor plugged in!!!
The monitor has done well it used to be on my only ever desktop running '95, then '98 with a 3gig hard drive!!!
How did i cope?

[RichEO]

Is there not an automatic cutout to prevent overcharging?

None of them are perfect, there will always be some overcharging, and the more it's plugged in, the more there is. And cheaper charging circuits are worse.