If you treat your battery with the greatest care, you will be able to take full advantage of its capacity.

First of all, knowing what kind of battery your laptop has, will help you to take advantage of it from the first charge.

Knowing your battery.

When buying a laptop, it is essential that you know the specifications of the model you choose, knowing this will help keep your laptop in good condition for longer.

The most new laptops today have a lithium-ion battery, but earlier models have a metal hydride or nickel-cadmium battery and each one has a different charging mode.

The First Charge.

The charging time of each battery is different and is due to some factors such as, the type of battery you have, the operating system, the time of use, the temperature and the configuration of your computer, among others.
You should know that some batteries charge in about 20 minutes while others may take hours to charge.
We recommend that the first charge of your battery be at the maximum capacity, before using your laptop. Then use the laptop in a normal way, until you reach 5% of the charge and then, fully charge it. Doing this several times will maximize the performance of your battery.

How and when do you charge your battery?

We recommend that you do not leave the battery connected to the electrical source when it is at maximum charge, as this reduces its life cycle. When the battery is fully charged disconnect it from the AC adapter and work on your laptop normally or if you prefer, remove the battery and use the power source directly on your laptop.
Every 3 or 4 months it is advisable to download and re-charge your battery completely to prolong its life. If you store your battery, you should connect it to your laptop at least once a month and let it discharge and charge it again a little.
Fun fact: a battery correctly stored in a period of 4 months will only be discharged at 15% of its totally capacity.

Maximize the performance of your battery.

If you can remove the battery from your laptop, do it at least 3 or 4 times in a year and clean, with a swab and a little alcohol, the magnetic connector that connects the battery with your laptop. This will ensure a more efficient power transmission and improve the performance of your battery.

Reducing the power consumption will help extend the useful life of your battery. The best way to do this, is deactivate the connections that you do not use, activate the energy saving mode, do not increase the brightness of the monitor to the maximum, etc.

Enter the configuration of your laptop and adjust the saving functions, hibernation mode, screen savers, auto save functions as required.

Carrying out these practices will help your battery to not lose the charge capacity so quickly. Although nothing lasts forever, sooner or later the batteries wear out for pure use and that is something we can not avoid.