Extend the life of Dell laptop battery massively by customizing charging

The battery is one of the component that gets degraded very quickly in the electronic devices. Some of the mobile phones are providing the battery protection which limits the charging once the battery reaches 85%. This is because the last 15% takes more effort to charge and will reduce the battery life.

When coming to the case of laptop, if you usually plug it in while working, then the battery will tend to reach 100% and then stop the charging. So, if the battery charge is 90% and then you plug in, it will charge to 100%.

If you don't usually need to work on a battery, we can avoid this charging by limiting the charging until the battery is discharged to a particular level.

In the Dell Laptop, the Dell Power app helps in achieving this.

• To open the app, type Dell in the Windows start and open the My Dell app.
• Then click the Power link.

• In the next page that opens, you can see the Custom option.

• In the Custom section, you can specify the 'Start Charging' and 'Stop Charging'.
• I have selected the 'Start Charging' to 50% and 'Stop Charging' to 80%.
• So, the battery won't start charging until the charge levels dropped to or below 50% and will charge until 80%. So, any time the charge will be in the level between 50 - 80% which should be good for a couple of hours work.

I choose 80% considering the fact that for mobile phones it takes more effort to charge after 85%, but again that depends on the type of battery in the laptop.

I have used the laptop for more than a week and I can see that the battery level is dropping by just 1% per day.