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On Mon, 29 Jul 1996, Robert Dewar wrote: > If you are concerned about prolonging battery life, then you should not > store the battery in your machine while you are using it (I am a little > curious as to why you *do* store the battery in your machine if you > know it is troublesome, and have already destroyed batteries this way). You're looking at this with 20/20 hindsight, Robert. Battery #1 died. I chalked it up to age at the time. Battery #2 died, and that's when I began to suspect it was the charge cycle killing it (things were fine until I started leaving my computer on all the time). Since IBM was replacing these things w/o question, I used battery #3 to test if the charge cycle really was killing it. I left it in for a little over a month. It died. I called IBM, and the rep pointed out the warranty was only 1 year. Another reason to keep the battery in is as a UPS. Not very important if you're using DOS/Win, but very nice if you're running OS/2, Unix, NT. > Basically only Lithium-Ion batteries can be handled without worrying > much about this sort of thing. Otherwise do NOT store a battery inside > your machine if you want maximum life. I have not been had any problems with leaving my 701's NiMH batteries in all the time. It's been there for over 5 months now, and still runs the pad for about 3 hours. The 701 does not do this 90% recharge thing. (Then again, the 701's batteries seem to hold their charge on shelf much longer than the 750's batteries.) > So I don't see the 90% charge as destroying the battery, I see it as normal > use -- i.e. what is necessary to keep the battery charged and ready to go > at a moment's notice, which is what many users want. If it's "normal" use, why does fully discharging it once a week help extend the life? (Battery #2 lasted about 3 months because I took the machine on the road every week or two. Battery #3 sat in the 750 for about 5 weeks without a full discharge, and promptly died. -- John H. Kim "I stop for red traffic lights" -- bumper sticker jokim@mit.edu commissioned by the City of Boston as part of a MIT Sea Grant campaign to shed its reputation for bad drivers.