[ltp] poll: how is your battery? (9-cell-battery lost about 25% capacity in 10 months)

[Joel Ebel]

I've had quite the opposite experience.  I maintained about 25 Dell 
laptops at a previous job, and we had to replace their batteries pretty 
much every year because they only would last about 5 minutes.  On the 
other hand, I'm still using my thinkpad battery that's well over 2 years 
old.  It has less than a third of its original capacity, but I can still 
get about an hour out of it.

One thing I think people should realize is that battery technology has 
changed a lot over time.  Newer devices are far more power hungry, so 
the primary design goal in new batteries is to get more power density. 
Another design goal is reducing the memory effect so people can be more 
careless in their recharging habits.  Both of these are fairly well 
accomplished with Lithium Ion batteries. However, this is done at the 
expense of recharge cycles.  The old Nickel Cadmium batteries could 
handle about 1000 recharge cycles.  Nickel Metal Hydride could take 
about 500.  Lithium Ion only can handle 200.  Battery manufacturers 
don't care since it means you'll buy more.  They've made your device run 
longer and better, you just have to pay for it.  So those of us who have 
used the older battery types before are certainly going to be 
disappointed with the short lifespan of a Lithium Ion battery.  Don't 
blame that on the thinkpad.  It's just a cost of high power density.

Joel

honey@gneek.com wrote:
> On Mon, 11 Jul 2005, David A. Desrosiers wrote:
> 
>>     Plan on replacing your battery roughly every year.
> 
> 
> - which it looks is true, and is a pretty appalling state of affairs.
> I don't have much to praise Dell about, but in general their
> batteries didn't deteriorate significantly in capacity (i.e. they
> were noticeably usable still) after 2-3 years.