In the past, the general rule made when using laptops for a long time was the same unplug the battery and keep plugging it in with power, so that the battery does not lose its strength. However, nowadays it is common practice that laptops bring in a built-in battery and they cannot be easily installed and removed without separating them. Does that law still apply?
Is the battery overloaded?
If in your case you own a laptop and keep plugging it in with power, you may at times be given several general and, often, conflicting advice. Should you disconnect it from the current in order for the battery cycles to charge and thus improve its durability? In some cases, there are people who think that when you leave the laptop connected to a fully charged battery, it is can be overloaded
Maybe on older laptops – they're quite old, actually – this is possible, but for years laptops have Hardware protection systems that can stop the battery from working. Generally, when the laptop detects that the battery is 100% it will stop charging and, using the same UPS transfer, will send external power directly to the laptop. In other words, it is as if we have removed the battery so it will not be too late.
How much does a laptop battery damage?
Unfortunately, batteries decrease over time whether or not you have a laptop connected. In fact, the battery will ruin you if you take it out and not use it. For this reason you may have the false impression that, if a laptop is long connected to a radio and you want to use it with a battery, it has lower autonomy than when the equipment is new. But this is normal, and the reason is not because you were connected to power, but because batteries were damaged.
How badly is the battery damaged? As always, it is. However, there is a table we present below prepared by Battery University (does this happen? Yes, it does) that analyzes how batteries are reduced by the time they are stored, unused, by a certain percentage of Charge for more than a year.
As you can see, if you keep the battery charged 100% at 25ºC at room temperature all year long, it will reduce 20% of its power, and if you do it with 40% charging, the interruption is only 4%. This means that if you are going to remove the battery from the laptop it is best to do it when it is 100% chargeable, it will decrease slightly.
So, do I always leave the laptop plugged in or not?
After seeing the data discarded, the best thing you can do to maintain battery durability is that if you're going to know that the laptop is always connected to power, take out the battery when about 40% charge and, from time to time, connect it to 100% download and reload to 40% before removing it again.
If your laptop does not have the opportunity to remove the battery, it is recommended that you do some "repair", and at least once a month remove the cable to allow the battery to run 20% – as indicated in the University Battery – and then reload it 100%.
In any case, as you may have seen by looking at the table above Heat is one of the biggest enemies of batteries, so if you remove and store it, it is recommended to do it in a cool and dry place, in fact it is much better cold.