On Tue, 2004-06-01 at 22:08, Sam MacDonald wrote: > Run laptop batteries down to the end of the charge for the first month. > Boot to a DOS diskette and turn off all power saving in the bios. Once > this has been done several times your battery will hold a better charge > and have a longer life. > > > This advice is no longer really helpful with newer laptops, due to the lithium ion chemistry of the battery packs. Lithium ion or lithium polymer packs do not suffer from memory effects, and are only limited by a number of charge/discharge cycles. Therefore, it is still more efficient to use the charge to the end, but draining them completely is not helpful like it used to be with NiCad chemistry batteries. If the pack does not have good voltage management, the lithium ion packs can be damaged by discharging too far. If a lithium cell goes below 2.8V for any appreciable amount of time, it is usually damaged. When next charged it will vent gas (flammable gas!). Fortunately most packs have good cell management. We use lithium packs similar to those in ipaqs/laptops in our robotics research at the U of M, and have had some close calls with damaged batteries. Hope this information is useful. -Chuck Hays lists at chuckhays.net _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list