How to Restore a Dead or Dying Laptop Battery. Laptop batteries are expensive hardware, so if you have an old laptop that still works fine who would want to shell out over $ 100 to replace the battery, right !? Fortunately, there are many techniques, technical, interesting, and strange, that people have come up with to recover dead laptop batteries.
In this article, I’ll try to list everything I’ve read, and if I remember where I read this, I’ll link to the original source. If you’ve tried to repair your laptop battery yourself, let us know your method in the comments.
The first method – the method of freezing
Once I saw a movie in which a guy’s phone was about to die, he took out the battery and got stuck in the snow, which apparently prolonged his life! I still don’t know if this is true or not, but apparently, you can freeze the laptop battery and get more power from it. Here is the procedure very briefly:
Step 1. Take out the battery and place it in a sealed Ziploc or plastic bag.
Step 2: Place the bag in the freezer and leave it there for about 12 hours. Some suggest leaving it for longer, but I wouldn’t leave it for more than 24 hours.
Step 3: Once you take it out, remove the plastic bag and let the battery warm up to room temperature. Be sure to wrap it in a towel and wipe off the condensation as it heats up.
Step 4. Insert the battery into the laptop and fully charge it.
Step 5. After charging, disconnect the power and allow the battery to fully discharge.
Now repeat steps 4 and 5 at least 4 times: fully charge, then fully discharge. It should be so! If your battery is not leaking acid, you should get some increase in battery life.
Note that you should only do this on NiCD or NiMH batteries. If you try this on a lithium battery, battery life will deteriorate. Unfortunately, there is no way to restore the lithium battery. You will need to look up your laptop specifications to find out what kind of battery you have. Lithium-ion batteries are not recoverable, but they can be extended. Read Method 2.
The second method – cool down your computer
If you have a lithium-ion battery, you can extend its life by making sure your laptop is cool. If your laptop gets very hot, it can damage the battery and shorten its life. I have an old Sony VAIO laptop and I noticed a significant increase in laptop battery life when I bought a laptop cooling pad from Amazon. You can get one for $ 20.
You might think that your battery is low, but it could simply be because it gets too hot and therefore runs out of power faster.
Third method – battery calibration
This is no longer necessary for most new batteries, but if the battery is running low it is likely a fairly old battery. In this case, re-calibration may be useful. Battery recalibration is performed because sometimes the operating system cannot determine how much capacity is left in the battery. This can happen if the laptop is always plugged into a power outlet or if the battery is never completely discharged.
You can determine if your battery needs calibration if your battery never charges to 100% (say only 95%) or if the OS says you have 35 minutes left but the computer dies either much sooner or much later Many manufacturers have released calibration tools for specific laptop models, so do a Google search first for your computer model + battery calibration. Here’s an example of a tool from Sony
If you need to manually calibrate the battery, the procedure is pretty simple:
Step 1. Charge the battery to 100% or whatever maximum percentage it can reach, and leave it there for about 2 hours to cool down.
Step 2: Now turn off the power and let the battery drain. There seem to be two views on how to do this You can either let the battery drain completely until the laptop dies, or tune it to go into sleep or hibernation mode by about 3-5%. Either way, you want the display to remain on until it turns off or goes into sleep mode.
Step 3. Leave the computer turned off for 3-5 hours.
Step 4. Turn it on again and let it charge to 100%.
That’s all. The computer should now give a more accurate reading of the actual battery capacity.
The fourth method – remove the battery when plugged in
If you have a laptop with a removable battery, you can try to remove the battery while plugged into the wall. You may need to check this because some laptops do not work properly with the battery removed. However, if the laptop is operating normally and is connected to a power source at all times, simply removing the battery may help.
Chemical reactions will occur in the battery whether it is in the laptop or not, but this can extend the life of the battery. Since the battery is cold and does not heat up when plugged in, the battery will last longer.
Of course, you need to make sure that you do not live in an area where the power goes out because your computer will immediately crash and you will lose all data. This method is also time-consuming and annoying, and most people won’t. The last method below may be the best.
The fifth method – completely disconnect the battery
The last option you can try is to let the battery charge to 100% and then just turn off the computer. When it nears death, i.e. less than 5%, turn it on and let it charge. However, this can shorten the life of new lithium-ion batteries, so it is recommended for these batteries to let the battery level drop to only 35–45% and then recharge to 75–85%. Sounds crazy, but obviously this will extend battery life because it won’t consume as many charges and recharge cycles.
How to Restore a Dead or Dying Laptop Battery
Again, this method also takes some work, but it’s worth trying if you really want to get more battery life. Have you used any other methods not mentioned here to increase laptop battery life? If so, let us know in the comments. Enjoy!
How to Restore a Dead or Dying Laptop Battery