Saturday 20 August 2011

The significance of having a good laptop battery

By Jacob Hunter


Your laptop or netbook can either directly from the mains or from the charge in your battery pack. Most people will use a combination of the two, plugging in their laptop whenever possible, but using it unplugged when there is no socket or they need to pass the laptop around or something like that.

Whilst at home, the tendency will be to plug the charger into the laptop and then into the mains power supply. This allows the laptop to stay on for hours on end without interruption. The drawback is reduced portability. You are obviously 'chained' to the wall with your movement restricted to the length of the charger cable.

If you do this with the laptop battery in, you will see reduced battery performance over time. The capacity will reduce. If your battery is still connected, having the charger plugged in means the battery is being subjected to a constant 'trickle charge'.

Trickle charge is when a current is constantly run through a battery and it gradually breaks down the cells. If you tended to get a couple of hours of charge originally, over time this might reduce to just half an hour or so.

Equally, running your laptop only from the battery brings drawbacks with it. Under normal usage, you can expect a decent HP laptop battery to last a couple of ours or perhaps a bit less if you are running intensive programs, such as games or DVDs. You will probably want to use it for longer than that if you're away from home and don't have mains power. This isn't all that long, even if your battery is in optimum condition.

HP Batteries as with all laptop batteries can come with different capacities. The higher the capacity, the more you should expect to pay for it and the longer it should power your laptop for. A better quality battery from a good supplier will also show improved results. Where the lower quality power packs will degrade faster and give shorter periods between charges, the higher quality versions will stand up to the rigours of charges and discharges far better.

The right laptop battery is therefore vital. If you're spending a bit of money on one, you want to make the right selection because on top of it being a waste of money, the wrong choice will also leave you reliant on having a power socket accessible, which isn't really the point of having a laptop.




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