How to preserve your battery charge on a Windows 11 laptop

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ISSUE 21.16 • 2024-04-15 Look for our BONUS issue on Monday, April 22! WINDOWS 11 By Lance Whitney Frustrated because your Windows laptop runs out of
[See the full post at: How to preserve your battery charge on a Windows 11 laptop]

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WSGeo, lmacri, fisher75, abbodi86

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You might want to add something on extending the life of the battery. Too many people run their laptop on battery for a while not putting much of a drain on it, then connect it to the charger and continually do this. This cuts the life of the battery as it goes through a charge cycle each time. The number of charge cycles are limited as the battery report will indicate over time. Most new laptops have an option to charge the battery up to a certain level (usually around 80%) and not recharge it until it hits around 50%. This does a log way to extend the batteries life.

JohnD

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rbailin, WSGeo

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Should do this for iPhones also.  I try not to charge above 80%.

iPhone 13, 2019 iMac(SSD)

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If you use one of these utilities to limit charging to 80%, remember to turn it off and charge your laptop to 100% before using it on the road. According to the article images, the author’s laptop charge was maxing out at 80% instead of 100%.

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This is a good,  detailed article for newbies and maybe even some veteran windows users.   However you didn’t note that a good way to extend battery life is to allow your battery to charge only to 80-85% instead of 100%.   To ease doing this some laptop manufacturers (including Lenovo which as you noted abandoned heavy clipon batteries) have a bundled proprietary system management app which allows the user to specify maximum the battery charge.

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rbailin, windbg

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Any advice for Windows 10 with the same problem?

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Windows 10 has most of the same settings as Windows 11. I have a Dell Latitude 5490. But I don’t put too much reliance on the laptop’s battery. I keep it plugged in most of the time and only use it on the battery for short durations when I really need to.

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I have an HP Envy 17 inch 23H2 Windows 11 laptop that’s less than a year old. Ever since I got it I’ve noticed that when the laptop is completely shut down (not sleeping, not hibernating, rapid boot disabled) and unplugged, it loses 9% of total battery capacity each 24 hours that it is off and shut down, despite not doing anything to discharge the battery. When I check with Windows 11’s system/battery settings after booting up, it sometimes (but not always) says that the screen was in use while the laptop was off (no one was using the screen while it was shut down and off). It is a touch-enabled screen, though I never touch the screen when using it.  My previous Windows 10 HP laptop did not exhibit this behavior, but it wasn’t touch screen enabled. It’s a poor battery anyway and will only provide about four hours of use unplugged between 100% and 20% charged. I hesitate to always use it plugged in, because that’s how I always used the Windows 10 laptop and the result was a swollen pillowed battery after only a few years use.

 

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Why can’t I find these settings on my desktop, that’s plugged into the wall?

Oh… right.

Sorry, just having some fun, I hope our support people will relate to. Remember the old story about the person who called support when they couldn’t start their computer in a power outage?

It does kinda bring to mind a question of, where in the OS or whatever does it recognize that it’s on a battery, and not AC? Thanks,

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Please don’t recommend people buy power banks, batteries and chargers off of Amazon. Amazon has become awash with counterfeiters and dodgy sellers in the last 5-8 years.

Underwriters Laboratories (UL) and the Electrical Safety Foundation (ESFI) have some good YouTube videos about this. They also discuss the insidious counterfeiting problem with chargers, LI batteries, and power banks – and even for electrical outlets (sold on Amazon and ebay), surge protectors and extension cords. Interpol co-sponsors the ESFI and their awareness campaigns, which should tell you something.

ESFI and UL Counterfeit Charger Short – Electrical Safety Foundation

An expert from UL advises [emphasis mine]:

“To be on the safe side, always order lithium-ion batteries directly from the manufacturer of your device. This recommendation also applies to battery chargers. Using a generic or non-branded charger can cause thermal runaway in even a properly manufactured and certified battery. Lithium-ion batteries operate in different voltage ranges based on the chemistry of the components, so an incorrect or counterfeit charger will not know how to “talk” to the battery in the right way.” She gives tips for how to avoid problems in this article:

How to Stay on Brand and Avoid Potentially Dangerous Fake Batteries and Chargers for Your Devices | UL Research Institutes

“A lot of what goes into a lithium-ion battery are safety mechanisms – both in and around the cell. Everything in and around the cell is there to control the energy and power so it delivers the electricity you need in a safe and measured way.”

I advise my family to only buy OEM products from the laptop maker (or cellphone maker) or a known local retailer, or from authorized resellers linked from the OEM’s website. At minimum, look for UL listed 3rd-party chargers and buy them direct via a trusted source. (Some counterfeiters will bother to fake the UL mark as well as the maker’s logo, so simply seeing the UL mark isn’t much better.)

 

 

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rbailin, windbg, pmcjr6142

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This is very very good advice, especially since many device manufacturers and suppliers have stopped providing AC adapter/charger cord accessories with the smartphone or tablet that you order online, making it necessary to purchase that accessory separately.

 

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If the laptop uses USB-C PD (power delivery), it is a standard protocol independent of vendor, so there is no issue of the charger not knowing how to “talk” to the battery. If it uses a barrel plug, there’s usually no talk going on at all (unless there is a third pin, as on many Dell models, which communicates the wattage capability of the charger).

The charger provides whatever voltage it provides (generally 19.5v, plus or minus half a volt), and the onboard electronics built into the laptop motherboard either connect the power to the battery or not depending on the charge state (voltage) of the battery. The era of laptop charger ports that are hardwired to the battery charge circuit (and that cannot be interrupted by the charging logic) are over, and if the voltage is out of spec that the MOSFETs can handle, it should (hopefully) disconnect the charging circuit to protect the unit. Hopefully.

The thing I would be more concerned with is ripple current. All AC to DC converters will have some degree of ripple, and too much of it can harm the components and/or cause stability issues. I bought a USB-C tester to be able to quantify the ripple for this.

There are good aftermarket brands of these items. My Acer’s OEM power wart has more ripple than the aftermarket one I got on Amazon for a low price. I was not going to connect it until I knew, but now that I do, I use it.

 

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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rbailin

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How to preserve your battery charge ?

Simple. Buy a laptop with long (+18 hours) battery life

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