A portable computer, as its name suggests, is a machine designed to be mobile! Therefore, it is based on a large battery to be able to offer you a good few hours of autonomy away from the charger or an electrical plug.
However, the reality is that many of us, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic times, use our laptop as a much more static machine, almost always in the same place, and of course, almost always connected to external monitors or other types of devices. of devices that complement the user experience.
Which raises a question… Does this cause problems for the laptop battery?
Laptop always connected to the charger? It's a problem?
Therefore, in a perfect world, a laptop charges its battery to the maximum defined by the manufacturer, and then draws its energy directly from the charger instead of always charging and discharging the battery. However, this doesn't always happen. In fact, even if this happens, always leaving the battery at 100%… Causes degradation of its energy storage capacity.
In fact, according to Kent Griffith, an assistant professor at the University of California who is researching how a battery may or may not degrade with normal use, leaving your laptop connected to the charger is actually a very bad idea.
In some cases, leaving a laptop connected to a charger for several weeks at a time could very well be the worst thing you can do to the battery of your portable computing machine, cutting the autonomy to 60% or 70%.
In other words, as always, as with any battery on the face of the earth, the ideal is to leave it between 20% and 80%, never below or never above these values.
As you can imagine, it takes some work to keep a battery within these values, but leaving your laptop always on ends up affecting its main mission, which is… Staying connected using your battery as its energy source. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to make an effort, especially in these times when it is not possible to simply change the battery like it used to be.
However, as you can imagine, it also doesn't make sense to take this completely literally. Neither 8 nor 80. Don't start being afraid of using the charger.
Technology serves to make our lives easier and not to cause us even more worries. Just try to be more careful, and from time to time unplug the laptop from the charger. If you use a USB-C monitor that is also capable of charging the battery. Just turn off the monitor when you have finished your work, so that it stops sending current to the laptop.