I had the honour of going to a client’s house to do some work on their website.  As you all know my laptop is a little old (about three years old) and I was demonstrating to the client how to upload their photos to their stock photography agency website. Needless to say, though my battery meter said I had over an hour remaining, my laptop battery decided to die.

Thinking about it, I had just read an article about laptop batteries and their expected lives. According to research a laptop battery should be good for about three hundred charges or so and you can expect the maximum battery life to decrease by 1 % per month. So in my case, I should expect only about 64% of the original charge (or roughly an hour or so).

Checking out the battery calibration utility, we can see that my 4400 mAh battery only has 2935 mAh capacity. Breaking out the trusty calculator, that leaves me at 66.7% of the original capacity.

Anyways, if I had just looked at the battery configuration utility, I would have known what to expect. We will look at battery calibration in a later article.