The situation differs from one battery to another, but as a rough guideline, about 500 full charge cycles is typical. The problem is that any laptop battery has a finite number of charge cycles, and the more of these cycles you put it through, the more worn-down it will become. As a matter of fact, leaving your battery on a high charge isn’t great either, as far as longevity is concerned.

In fact, it can be a good thing to do once in a while, as it helps your battery to more accurately estimate how much juice it has left, compared to if you left it on 90%-plus charge all of the time. We’re not saying you should absolutely never do this. But yeah, if you’re one of those people who regularly allow their laptop battery to discharge almost to zero, before charging it right back up to 100%… that’s probably not a good idea.

Hey, back up a bit! The truth is that regardless of what you do with your laptop battery, it will wear down over time – that’s just how batteries are. So if leaving the laptop fully charged isn’t an issue… what about discharging? Even leaving a laptop plugged in once it has reached 100% charge will just mean the charger stops charging the battery.Īs a result, the laptop will be left to run directly off the power cable, and once the battery has discharged a bit, the charger will kick back into gear to keep the battery topped off nicely. The important takeaway point here, though, is that you can’t ‘overcharge’ either type of battery. In both cases, it’s the movement of electrons that creates that much-needed power, with this flow also instrumental in preserving the health of the battery. You see, although there are two main types of batteries used in laptops – lithium-ion and lithium-polymer – and these are distinctly different technologies, the way they work is actually broadly the same. Phew! It’s good to get that one out of the way. So, what is the truth? As is so often the case with matters like this, the answer’s a bit more complicated than you might initially presume. But there are also many unhelpful myths circulating about them, as shown by the popularity of ‘leaving laptop plugged in’ and ‘can you overcharge a laptop’ Google searches by those seeking the truth. We all want our laptop batteries to last for as long as possible, of course. Given how paranoid many of us are about keeping our smartphone batteries going until we can find a charging socket in the nearest coffee shop, train or bus, it’s perhaps understandable that the also-not-insignificant matter of the batteries in our laptops is sometimes overlooked.

Using laptop without battery