Battery Life In Laptop

My Acer laptop is around 18 months old I use it mostly in the home office with the power supply in.
I only move to other locations in the house and use battery power infrequently.
I am using it this morning on battery just surfing the web and after only one hour the charge indicator is down to half having started on full.
What is the normal life of battery's and how long would you expect to get out of a full charge.

Re: Battery Life In Laptop

My Battery last for 2 hrs before recharging it .. I was told you have to run the battery down low ,dont just keep topping up , Also If you are using it more on mains ,I think you take the Battery out ..

Re: Battery Life In Laptop

Mine (Lenovo) is supposed to last up to 6 hours. I've never tried that, but it is down to about 50% after almost 3 hours. I do have a number of power management settings that determine how the laptop works eg.. dim / blank screen after a certain time of inactivity.

Re: Battery Life In Laptop

I have a DELL Inspiron and if I run it on battery alone, I'd be lucky to get 90 minutes out of it. Even if I dim the screen right down, 2 hours is not likely.

My previous laptop, a Fuji, was the same. The claims of 4-8 hours are total rubbish

Re: Battery Life In Laptop

I agree with most of you 2 to 3 hours is the most you can expect from a laptop battery. My Lenovo shows about 2.5 hours available when fully charged but I try to recharge about 50% because these batteries last longer that way rather than letting them run down to the point where the computer turns off (I am not fanatical aout it though).

The Lenovo has an option where the DVD drive can be replaced by a battery for extra life but it is not cheap and it is not that often I am far from a power point.

Re: Battery Life In Laptop

I suspect that was old info from the days when batteries had a 'memory'. Modern batteries don't have that defect and can be recharged something like three times more from half discharged than from say 10% charge. Their life is defined by the number of recharges rather than usage (as I understand it)

As for taking the battery out nothing wrong with that, don't do it personally but the batteries are designed to be used so I try to cycle the battery ie use it then plug it in after a while. I have read that never discharging a battery shortens its life but there are those that claim this is not true so I hedge my bets.

Re: Battery Life In Laptop

Any idea how long batteries should last before they need replacing, or is that rather like 'how long's a bit of string'?
How much do they cost approx.?
I've just got my first ever laptop so I don't know much about them yet.

Re: Battery Life In Laptop

My acer laptop has 69% 2hrs 38mins remaining so not too bad.

Mups, we bought our hp laptop in 2007 and it's never had a new battery, not sure if that's the norm, it gets used daily but mostly on the mains now - I think the battery has had it now.

Re: Battery Life In Laptop

As I intimated above I think the life is defined by the number of times it is recharged and how rather than time.

Re: Battery Life In Laptop

Batteries are so unreliable, I hate them, you’d think in this day and age they would have come up with something better, but why should they spend any money researching an alternative when the makers are sitting on a gold mine, have you seen the cost of replacing batteries for laptops?
But I suppose it could be worse Seacroft, you could be sitting on a rock 300 million miles in space with a gammy battery.