WVZR1 wrote:
The post by "aditya1956" certainly makes good sense and short of keeping a "near dud" loaded it's similar to what I thought might be a plan. I'll just maybe try to "pay attention"!
My concern was a 9 cell I bought for my T60 is 7 months old and shows 77.0Wh available against an 84.5Wh design capacity with 15 cycles. It's not my abuse but the condition I purchased it in. Was it abused?"
Perhaps it was simply used for that many cycles !
There is really nothing like abusing a battery as long as it is used with a device it was designed for, that is, not exceeding its current sourcing limit, b'coz then its internal chemicals will very quickly deteriorate and loose their ability to revert back fully to the original state, and thus reduce its life cycle drastically. All the notebooks' hardware inside are designed to take care of this issue to a very good extent, though not fully. A ckt fully capable of taking absolute care of a battery and its charge/discharge process will be very complex/costly and probabely is beyond the scope of an averege notebook particularly in a such a competitive market as it is today.
Yes, unlike Ni-Cads, which are not affected so much by severe variations in the loads seen by them, and prefer a deep discharge/charge cycle to get the best durability out of them, Li-Ions suffer when deeply discharged and charged. Ni-Cads suffer from a problem called "Memory Effect", that is, if not discharged fully before the charging process, say from a half discharged state, then it accepts its' future capacity to be also half. But Li-Ions do not have this problem and can be charged from any state without any adverse effects for quite long periods. But both the type of batteries dislike to be left in a fullly discharged state for long. It may kill them fully if not charged immediately. So for storage purposes one should leave the battery in a partially charged condition.
I've a 6 cell that's within .1Wh of design capacity, a 2 cell module that shows no loss and the 9 I just mentioned. I travel with it seldom, should I keep the 9 and the 2, sell the 6 or just rotate and store in a cool place with a minimal charge, 70% or so?"
The number of extra batteries at one's disposal simply indicates the extra amount of time that he/she can use the notebook for in the absence of an external power source, by swapping the batteries one after the other, and nothing else. This will definitely be of lot of help to someone who is always mobile. The only other reason for having many batteries probabely can be due to them being available at a very cheap price. Otherwise I don't find any other reason. So the choice is yours. If you want to keep it then just leave it in a cool place with some 50/60% charge left. It will be there for a long time. You can even leave it inside the fridge inside a sealed packet on the bottom most rack assuming it to be the least cooled place in your fridge.
But before starting to use such a battery kept in this manner, one should first leave it in the open for sometime so that the battery is back to the normal room temperature.
I'm quite new to this "ThinkPad" thing and opinions are welcome! My Grand Father would have told me "It's quite a CONTRAPTION!"
Yes, probabely your Grand Father would have been right in his observation. But this is relative. Every generation has its' own contraptions and complexities.
Coming back to notebooks & their batteries, onething we should not forget here and that is, it was a machine designed primarily for mobile use and that's why it was mandatory to have a battery of its' own inside it, whereas today nealy 70% of the notebooks sold are being used as desktop substitutes, even when a desktop is readily present ! Anyway the battery gradually has to face a natural death even though it was not frequently used as a substitute power source, and this hurts, atleast psychologically. And that is the reason why all these threads and tweaks have popped up ! B'coz it is beyond the scope of the standard control-hardware embedded inside the machine to take care of a battery which is always plugged in to the AC ! It was expecting it to fully recycle itself most of the time and thus the method to calculate the life span !
I am still waiting for the time to come when notebooks will be provided without batteries of all shapes and sizes, and instead will have only standard battery compartment/s where I can just pop in some standard Re-Chargeable cells of Sanyo/LG etc. etc. and go on using it. I don't think it is far away. The digital camera industry has already done it to a very good extent by reducing the use of proprietary batteries. But before anything happens for notebooks the greed of the manufacturers has to come down first. But the chances now are high as the sale of notebooks are very high and is ever increasing. One can hope that they will soon decide to earn their profits by selling notebooks, not selling batteries.
Cheers
