I have a Toshiba laptop.
It's nearly one year old.
The battery seems to be dying.
To start with and even recently... I had no complaints.
It's supposed to have 3 hours+ lifetime.
Right now... a fully charged battery will only last 60 minutes. : (
Am I doing something wrong or is this common?
Thanks.
OM
Yes, it's fairly common, and whether you did something wrong is open
to debate.
It's possible to extend the useful life of a laptop battery if you
follow the proper care procedures:
1. Don't recharge a battery until it's drained. Yes, I know fully
draining a NiMH or Li-Ion battery is extremely bad, but the hardware
on a modern laptop and built into most modern batteries makes it
impossible to drain a modern laptop battery to zero.
2. Don't run a computer on mains (aka. hydro, house current, plug, AC)
with the battery in place. The reasons are two fold. First, running
it on mains causes most laptops to apply a trickle current to "top up"
the battery. In the short term, it's convenient, as it gives you a
bit more juice so you can use the machine on battery a bit longer
later if you need to. However, as you're charging a battery that's
probably not drained, doing this repeatedly will reduce the life span
of the battery. The added heat of the charging circuit and the rest
of the laptop isn't doing the battery any favours either. The
recommended course of action is to pull out the battery before you
plug in to run the laptop off AC.
Of course, nobody bothers doing this, as it's rather inconvenient and
you buy a laptop for the convenience. The same goes for a cell phone
and its battery. If you do that, it's usually possible to still have
2/3 or more of original battery capacity even 2-3 years later,
sometimes longer.
If you use (and abuse) it like most people do, the charge capacity on
a laptop battery will drop considerably within a year or two, which is
where you are. At that point, you will likely have to replace the
battery or have it rebuilt at a specialty battery shop. Figure
$50-$200 depending on the model, and whether you have it rebuilt or
replaced.
There is one other thing you can try before swearing and marching to
place your battery order though. While NiMH and Li-Ion batteries do
not have memory problems like the older NiCad batteries, I've been
told that doing repeated partial charges can confuse the charging
circuitry in some NiMH and Li-Ion laptop batteries. Doing a full
discharge (ok, for the nitpickers, not a FULL discharge, but as close
as the circuitry will allow) and full charge, and then repeating this
a few times (few being 3-5 times), will sometimes fix it. Assuming of
course, that the problem was this particular glitch.
Keep in mind that no matter what you do, the charge capacity of a
battery will drop steadily and eventually will drop to below a useful
level. There's not much you can do about it. Laptop batteries don't
last forever. It's kind of why you see a lot of perfectly good,
older laptops being used sans batteries. The battery's died of old
age, and either the laptop's too old to get a replacement battery, or
the replacement's too expensive for the owner (some have fairly
expensive generics available, but as I mentioned, some of them run
into the hundreds of dollars).
