Lithium-Ion Batteries for Laptops Have Finite Lifespans
Dave Aiello wrote, "Over the past two months, I have found that the lithium-ion battery on my Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop has deteriorated in terms of its ability to keep the laptop running without being connected to an external power source. The laptop is approaching two years old, but I did not use it regularly for the first six months I owned it."
"Having owned portable devices with less sophisticated battery technology, I began searching the Dell Support Web Site for information about how to deep-cycle or recalibrate my lithium-ion battery. I found a program that supposedly provides this capability, but it only works if you are running a Microsoft Operating System. It was only after I began searching for Linux-specific help with lithium-ion batteries that I found information about the expected life of lithium-ion batteries. Read on for more details."
Dave Aiello continued:
Answers began to come from the Dell|Talk Inspiron Power Management Forum. This user-to-user support area repeatedly indicates that lithium-ion batteries have finite lives, and these lives are determined by the total number of recharge cycles to which the battery has been subjected. One participant in the discussion pointed to an article about laptop battery life on an Australian computer dealer's web site that suggests that lithium-ion batteries have a life of 1,000 recharge cycles. Therefore, "If you run your Laptop on {normal AC power} all the time you may ruin a perfectly good battery within 6 months."
I was surprised by this, and so I sought a way to confirm this independently using the Internet. I found an article on ComputerHope which indicates the performance characteristics of lithium-ion batteries. The article lists among the "Distinct advantages of today’s Li-ion batteries" are:
- No memory effect
- 500 to 800 charging cycles
To me, this means that I probably have exhausted the number of recharge cycles that could reasonably be expected to be gotten from the original lithium-ion battery that came with my laptop. So, I decided to go ahead and buy a replacement battery from iGo.com because it was the most widely recommended source for OEM-quality Inspiron batteries.
My question is, why isn't lifecycle information for lithium-ion batteries more widely known?