Sixth post - leaving your laptop plugged in all the time
This doesn't apply much to mobile devices, but we should address the effect of leaving your laptop plugged in all the time.
Just as charging to 100% capacity is stressful on a battery, so is sitting at 100% charge all the time. It's literally stressful to the battery's construction - you've got a huge reserve of electrons being held in electrochemical stasis, and they want to flow and move and balance out the charge in the battery. Leaving a battery in this state of imbalance (100% charge) full time will begin to wear down the battery's ability to hold a charge.
But a lot of laptop users are plugged in a lot of the time. So what to do? My suggestion, if you put less than one cycle a week on your battery presently (see how to calculate a charge cycle above) is to artificially perform one once a week. Every Friday, unplugging until you hit 30% and then recharging will go a long way to keeping the battery healthy over its normal 3 year lifespan.
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-Scott
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