Pavilion 15-ba015na: battery: remove or not?

[NoWiz]

Hi,

My original question would have been: should I remove the battery when work I on AC in order in order to conserve battery life?

Browsing this forum I saw a recent reply to a similar question. The question was, is it safe to remove the battery when working AC - and the reply was yes, however, repeated removal and reinsertion may reduce battery life.

I am at a loss. I thought the whole point of removing the battery when working on AC WAS to conserve battery life. This is important for me as I will need my long-life battery to stay long-life. My old laptop goes back to the time before long-life batteries, It never lasted more than about 30-35 minutes and with age (about 10 years) this is down to virtually a couple of minutes. Mind you, I v enver bothered to take out the battery when on AC.

So what is your advice? Remove or not? 

A corollary question: Going through the settings I discovered somewhere that it is possible to extend battery life if I change the setting. It would result in a bit slower operation but longer battery time. 

Any idea how much slower and hoe much longer?

(Mind you, I'm nort sure I'll ever find the place where I could reset that feature...)

TIA as always.

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

I don't know what kind of battery is in your old laptop but even 10 years ago laptops were using lithium-ion batteries and they have not really improved that much. What has happened is the engineers have found ways for the laptops to use less power. 10 years ago we did not have low-voltage processors and memory, etc. 

If the laptop is going to be completely stationary and used as a desktop it makes some small amount of sense to remove and store the battery. Run it down to about 60% and store it in a cool dry place. However, this is a lot of effort that will likely not extend the life of the battery by very much. The battery has a smart chip inside and the power management of the laptop prevents recharge/charge cycles until the battery drops below 95% usually. 

HP has this helpful tutorial on battery life.

http://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c01297640

Yes you can tweak the power settings but at the end of the day if you want to extend runtime (how long it runs on a charge as opposed to "battery life" which is the number of months/years the battery lasts) the biggest single thing is turn down screen brightness. 

People vastly overthink laptop batteries. Just let the system handle it. Don't run the battery below about 15-20% power before recharging. That is about the only rule. Good luck. 

[NoWiz]

Thank you very much, Huffer! Just the sort of hands-on advice I was hoping for.

The HP video plus info on batteries was also useful. I'm at ease now 🙂

Have a nice day.