# How to drain the laptop battery



## whiterose_uk (Aug 21, 2009)

I have a samsung nc10 and as far as im aware, in order to keep the battery in good order its good to completely drain them from time to time before re-charging. I thought i could do this by turning it on n off n on n off unitll there is no power left to turn it on at all.
Problem is that my battery wont completely drain. When the battery gets so low that the laptop turns off, it goes into standby! I cant turn it back on till i plug the mains in but there is still lights on the laptop. This is not completely draining the battery so, is there any way of completely draining the battery so that there is no lights on the laptop etc. or is it not possible?


----------



## TheOutcaste (Aug 8, 2007)

Most batteries won't let you completely drain them. In fact, draining them completely will ruin them.
They have built-in circuitry to prevent that from happening. The battery pack is made of multiple cells, and one cell will always go dead before the others. If you try to drain the battery pack, the first cell to be drained will end up having a reverse voltage applied, which is somewhat less than healthy.

Lithium ion or NiMH batteries don't suffer from the memory effect that the much older NiCAD batteries do, so don't need to be drained.

NiMH battery life is more a number of charge/discharge cycles, so they shouldn't be recharged too soon for maximum life.
Lithium ion life is dependent more on the age of the battery than the number of charge/discharge cycles, and it won't hurt them to be recharged when only partialy discharged.

The main reason to "Drain the battery completely" is to re-calibrate the monitor that tells you how much life is left in the battery.

You can change the power settings so the system goes into standby/hibernate at a lower percentage of remaining battery life.
*Control Panel | Power Options*
*Change plan settings
Change advanced power settings* 
At the bottom, several options under *Battery*.
Make sure the *Low battery action* is *do nothing*
Set the *Critical battery level* to 3-5%
Set the *Critical battery action* to *shut down/hibernate*, instead of sleep.
You may have to change BIOS settings as well.


----------

