when to charge battery?

Should you let the battery drain out everytime before recharging it? I did drain & recharge it several times when I fisrt got it but wasn't sure about now. I have 1.5 hours left on this charge. Acer Aspire D250

 

This is pretty good advice:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/191574/l ... ttery.html

 

thanks I learned alot from reading that.

 

Update: Battery was defective. Since it was still under warrenty, Acer sent me a new one with free return postage to return the old one. Great service from them.

 

There's some good info there. I don't agree with taking the battery out if you're going to stay plugged in for a while, their logic on it being good for the battery is open to debate. And the big disadvantage is that you now have a hard stop if you lose power for some reason (cord gets knocked out, power goes out, etc.). That is for sure bad for your PC.

One general rule of thumb for laptop Li-ion batteries is to stay plugged in whenever you can. The less cycles you put the battery through, the longer it will last. I had a $200 extended battery in a new Dell, running it dead almost every day and charging it every night. In less than a year, I had about 50% of the runtime that I used to have. When I got the second battery, I plugged in whenever I could and a year and half out I'm still near full capacity.

 

People have their preferences for how they use the netbook. Mine stays plugged in by an armchair for weeks on end. Why would I even want to think about a battery? When not used I keep the battery in a drawer at 40% charge and cycle it every couple of months - heading into two years it's still good for 1.5 hours when needed. Obviously, if I were up and about with the machine more often I'd keep the battery in and try to coddle it.

(Using a small pad with a clip to guide the cord, no problem with accidental unplugs, and even so, running XP over 8 years on three machines, with too many hard shutdowns to remember, none ever did any damage except losing unsaved document files.)

 

Keep the energy level above 10-20%. Dont always keep it charged and use the battery.