How to Restore a Dead or Dying Laptop Battery

Laptop batteries are expensive pieces of equipment, so if
you have an old laptop that still works fine, who wants to
shell out upwards of $100 to replace the battery right!?
Luckily, there are a lot of ways, some technical, some
interesting and some strange ones, that people have
come up with to restore dying batteries on laptops.
In this article, I’m going to try to list out all the different
ones I’ve read about and if I can remember where I read
it, I’ll link back to the original source. If you have tried to
restore a laptop battery yourself, let us know your method
in the comments.
Method 1 – The Freezing Method
I once saw a movie where a guys’ phone was about to die,
so he took out the battery and stuck in some snow, which
apparently made it last longer! I still don’t know if that’s
true or not, but apparently you can freeze a laptop battery
and get more juice out of it. Here’s the procedure very
succinctly:
Step 1: Take your battery out and place it in a sealed
Ziploc or plastic bag.
Step 2: Go ahead and put the bag into your freezer and
leave it there for about 12 hours. Some people 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 until it reaches room temperature.
Be sure to wrap it in a towel and wipe away any
condensation as it warms up.
Step 4: Reinsert the laptop battery and charge it
completely.
Step 5: Once charged, unplug the power and let the
battery drain all the way down.
Now repeat steps 4 and 5 at least 4 times: charge all the
way to full, then discharge completely. That should be it!
Unless your battery is leaking acid, you should get some
kind of bump in the battery life.
Note that you should only perform this on NiCD or NiMH
batteries. If you try this on a lithium battery, it’ll make the
battery life worse. Unfortunately, there is no way to
restore a lithium battery. You’ll have to find your laptop
specs to see what kind of battery you have. For lithium
ion batteries, you can’t restore, but you can possibly
extend the life of a battery. Read method 2.
Method 2 – Cool Your Computer
If you have a lithium ion based battery, you can increase
it’s life by making sure your laptop is cool. If you have a
laptop that gets really hot, it can damage the battery and
cause the shortness in battery life. I have an old Sony
VAIO laptop and I saw a significant increase in laptop
battery life when I bought a laptop cooling pad off
Amazon. You can get one like this for $20.
You may think your battery is on it’s last leg, but it could
simply be that it’s getting too warm and therefore loses
charge faster.
Method 3 – Recalibrate Your
Battery
With most newer batteries, this is no longer necessary,
but if your battery is dying, then it’s probably a pretty old
battery. In that case, you may benefit from a
recalibration. Recalibrating a battery is done because
sometimes the operating system cannot figure out how
much capacity is left in the battery. This can happen if
the laptop is always plugged in or if the battery was never
let to die all the way.
You can tell whether your battery needs calibration if your
battery never charges to 100% (say only to 95%) or if the
OS says you have 35 min of battery remaining, but the
computer dies either much sooner or much later. A lot of
manufacturers have released calibration tools for specific
laptop models, so first perform a Google search with your
computer model + battery calibration. Here’s an example
tool from Sony .
If you have to manually recalibrate a battery, the
procedure is pretty straight-forward:
Step 1: Charge your battery to 100% or to whatever max
percentage it can reach and leave it there for about 2
hours to cool down.
Step 2: Now disconnect the power and let the battery
drain. There seems to be two views about how to do this.
You can either let the battery run down all the way until
the laptop dies or you can set it so that it goes to sleep or
hibernates around 3 to 5%. Either way, you want to make
sure the display stays on until it either dies or goes to
sleep.
Step 3: Let the computer remain turned off for anywhere
between 3 to 5 hours.
Step 4: Turn it back on and let it charge all the way to
100%.
That’s pretty much it. Now the computer should be giving
you a more accurate reading of the actual capacity of the
battery.
Method 4 – Remove Battery When
Plugged In
If you have a laptop with a removable battery, you can try
to remove the battery during the times you have it plugged
into the wall. You may have to test this because some
laptops don’t work properly with the battery removed.
However, if the laptop is running fine and it’s connected
to a power source all the time, it may help to simply
remove the battery.
The chemical reactions will continue to occur in the
battery regardless of whether or not it’s in the laptop, but
it could increase the life of the battery. Since the battery
is cool and not hot when plugged in, you’ll get more life
out of your battery.
Of course, you’ll need to make sure you’re not living in an
area where the power goes out because your computer
will die immediately and you’ll lose any data. This method
is also time-consuming and annoying and something
most people won’t do. The last method below may be the
best.
Method 5 – Unplug at Full Battery
The last option you can try is to let the battery charge to
100% and then simply unplug the computer. When it gets
close to dying, i.e. less than 5%, go ahead and plug it in
and let it charge up. However, this could reduce battery
life on newer lithium ion batteries, so for those batteries
it’s suggested you only let the battery level drop to 35% to
45% and then charge it back up to 75% to 85%. Sounds
crazy, but apparently that will give you the best battery
life because it won’t use up as many charge and recharge
cycles.
Again, this method also requires a bit of work, but it’s
worth a try if you really want to increase your battery life.
Have you used any other methods not mentioned here to
increase your laptop battery life? If so, let us know in the
comments. Enjoy!