What does "totally discharge" mean?

[AlanHK]

The battery on my X24 has lost half its capacity, (only used about 40 times) so I'm trying to recondition it. According to the help in the Battery Maximizer application, I should "Let the battery totally discharge, then let the battery charge."

How do I know when it has "totally discharged"?
Just run it with shutoff timers disabled till the screen goes black? Or what?


I haven't found any fully automatic tool to do this -- is there?

[mikeh]

Capacity loss on Li-Ion happens with age, if you use it or not. they last longer if stored cool and only part-charged.
"full discharge" means down to the lowest charge allowed. If alarms are off, the battery will turn itself off at this point. To avoid disk corruption, you might want to do this in bios mode, without the OS running.

Does software "reconditioning" really work?

[aaa]

That's basically it, just let it run down all the way. I doubt it's going to help much though. It's just recalibration of how much the battery thinks it has left.

[AlanHK]

That's basically it, just let it run down all the way. I doubt it's going to help much though. It's just recalibration of how much the battery thinks it has left.

I did it twice, the battery "health" improved, the capacity was 20 something, now up to 37 (new was 40).

But it was a bit weird -- I was just playing Freecell till it ran down. It was on "6 minutes -- 5%" for about half an hour, then on "1 minute -- 1%" for another half hour. It was on zero, still working, for few minutes when I shut it down.

I've seen it recommended to do this once a month.
Is there a bootdisk that does this safely and efficiently, with some indication of battery level?

I don't have any external drives, but have been experimenting with UNetbootin which helps make a bootable USB thumb drive.

[fixup]

I broke two batteries due to "fully discharged".

Never let the battery be discharged without some kind of monitoring. If you run Windows, make sure you set it to standby or hibernate at 2% or so. If you disable this alarm action as instructed by the IBM manual (obviously written by a non technical and non English), and let the battery go lower than 2%, your battery will be permanently damaged.

Don't do this every month or so because running battery down to 2% is not a good thing to the Li-Ion. Obviously the manual was initially written in the NiMH days and never be well rewritten for Li-Ion.

[comptiger5000]

Discharging to 0% WILL NOT destroy a battery. Discharging beyond the point where the laptop will shut off (0%) in BIOS, however, can.

[proaudioguy]

So what is the solution then? The directions say to disable the shut off timers and let hte computer run all the way down. At that point it shuts off without shutting down properly.

[Raceboy]

It does nothing harm to the battery when discharging to 0%!!! Gee, where does that information come from?

And it doesn't do any harm also to hard drive if you have hard drives stopped during shutoff. Like setting the laptop to turn the hard drive off after xx minutes and then just letting it idle until the battery discharges.

Totally discharging is useful even to LiIon batteries, not only NiMh/NiCd ones.

[aaa]

It does nothing harm to the battery when discharging to 0%!!! Gee, where does that information come from?

From batteries dying on people. May have been a coincidence though, fwiw I drain to 0 pretty often and it continues to work.

You need to drain all the way to calibrate properly, that's the point. Stopping at 6% or whatever doesn't make sense since a battery that needs calibration doesn't know exactly where 6% is.

You shouldn't do it too often though (I think every month's too often), you're just needlessly adding another charge cycle/wear. Perhaps every 6 months. It doesn't do any good to the actual (lithium) battery cells, again it's just recalibration, not "reconditioning" or whatever.

And it doesn't do any harm also to hard drive if you have hard drives stopped during shutoff. Like setting the laptop to turn the hard drive off after xx minutes and then just letting it idle until the battery discharges.

There's the risk of corrupting Windows. The hard drive will be fine, after you reformat it. It's a pretty low chance though, did it hundreds of times before, then one day the registry went kaput.

[AlanHK]

And it doesn't do any harm also to hard drive if you have hard drives stopped during shutoff. Like setting the laptop to turn the hard drive off after xx minutes and then just letting it idle until the battery discharges.

There's the risk of corrupting Windows. The hard drive will be fine, after you reformat it. It's a pretty low chance though, did it hundreds of times before, then one day the registry went kaput.

As I mentioned, I found UNetbootin, which lets you load a bootable disc image on a USB thumb drive.
I used DSL (D*amn Small Linux), a stripped down Ubuntu, (50 MB) which comes up with a nice GUI, and its default desktop displays your battery level and time remaining. So you can use this till the battery fades, with no fear of corrupting your hard disk, as it runs in RAM alone.

I guess you could just leave it on a BIOS screen, but that's rather boring, at least with DSL you can play Freecell. I'm still trying to work out wifi, I'm sure it would work with a wired network without any problems.

[comptiger5000]

I usually leave a machine in BIOS and go do something else for this process.

[Raceboy]

I've been into computers and laptops for 15 years and always done total discharge for batteries at least once a month and for some reasons I've got maximum life of them also.

Oh, and I've never had a case of corrupted Windows when hard drive was turned off.

[mikeh]

total is not "total".
If you drain a Li-Ion cell to far, it will be destroyed.
The laptop battery has built-in hardware protection to stop that from happening.
If the OS or BIOS doesn't do soemthing first, the battery will just turn off.
Like pulling the plug on a desktop PC, that risks data and filesystem corruption.
(Unless you run a Real OS with a journalling filesystem.)

hope that clarifies.

[mrobo]

you must boot from pc -doctor cd and run the battery drain program
it (before you run it drain the battery normaly out by using-working on computer) drain out the battery and afther then can callibrate where is the limit of the battery lowest voltage

[AlanHK]

you must boot from pc -doctor cd and run the battery drain program

The X24 doesn't have a CD drive, and I don't have an external.
And the PC Doctor for X24 does not have a battery drain option.

[TheRedFox]

I read somewhere to discharge to 10% when recalibrating LiIon batteries, but maybe that didn't include the 'smart' ones (like the one in the X31 for example). I don't know.