The whole purpose of a laptop is to be portable – and without a battery , it’s a lot harder to keep things mobile. Every piece of electronics eventually degrades over time. Eventually, your battery’s going to die. If you follow the best practices on this list, you can keep things running for just a bit longer.

1. Don’t fully discharge the battery before charging. Believe it or not, in newer, Lithium based batteries, this can actually shorten the battery’s effective lifespan, since it puts the battery under a great deal of stress. Further, modern batteries can be charged regardless of how much energy they’ve got left – so there’s really no reason to fully discharge them.
2. Depending on what type of battery you’ve got, leaving your battery in while your laptop is charged could either be harmful, or have no impact whatsoever. Heat has been known to shorten battery life, however, so if you know your laptop tends to heat up when you’re doing processor-intensive tasks, it might be a good idea to pull it out.
3. If you don’t care to remove the battery, you should, at the very least, purchase a cooling stand for your laptop (or make one yourself). Again, you want to keep things cool.
4. If you’re planning to store your battery for an extended period of time, be sure to discharge it until it reaches around 40% capacity, then put it in as clean and dry a place as possible. The key here is isolating it from too much heat and humidity.
5. If you’re particularly paranoid, you could try downloading a battery management program such as Batterycare, though it’s not strictly necessary.
6. It should go without saying that you want to keep your battery away from water or any other liquids. It’s like any other piece of electronic equipment – it doesn’t really like to get wet.

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