6 Cell vs. 9 Cell - How charged was yours

[admsteiner]

In a couple of the other threads people were discussing how full the charge on the new batteries were on their Thinkpads. My 6 cell that came with my machine had a 97% charge. I ordered a 9 cell from IBM's website and it came with a 35% charge.

My theory is that they assume people will be using the battery on their thinkpads, so they ship those batteries full (perhaps when they are going to end users and not meant for storage). However, these extra 9 cells, they've been sitting in storage, so they leave them around the 40% mark.

Has anyone else ordered a battery seperately from IBM's site?

Just my .02
--Adam

[K. Eng]

I remember that my 6-cell was charged to about 40% when I got it.

[Moroner]

I remember vaguely an article on Li-Ion batteries, in which it was explained that for storage, the batteries should be about 40% charged to minimize the permanent loss in energy storage capacity. This problem comes with Li-Ion technology, they degrade over time even if not used. Fully loaded batteries degrade 10 to 20 times faster than those at 40%. So it is probably a fault if you received a fully loaded battery.

[admsteiner]

True, but what I think is happening is that IBM is shipping the laptop batteries that come with laptops with a full charge. The reasoning being that when you or I get our laptops, we want to be able to use them right away as opposed to wait a day for them to deep-charge.

The batteries which are purchased seperately, which IBM probably has in storage somewhere, those get stored at 40%.

A lot of other people wrote about getting their laptops with fully charged batteries, hence my theory

--Adam