Discharge The Battery

It hasn't been that long since I bought a new battery for my laptop.  I thought I got a pretty good deal on eBay.  It was definitely a better deal than buying it from Dell!

When I first got the battery, I could run my computer for 2-1/2 hours on battery power.  Then it was down to 2 hours, an hour and a half, an hour.  It just seemed that the battery should last longer than that.  Then last week I was using the computer on battery power when it told me, after about an hour, that I needed to plug my computer in or risk losing my work, and then it went to Stand-by like it's supposed to.  So, I plugged in and re-started.

I was happily surfing the net when I noticed the low battery indicator light was still flashing.  That's when I realized I had been using the computer for about 45 minutes, and I wasn't really plugged in.  I had plugged into a power strip, but the power strip wasn't turned on.  So, even though my power indicator told me that my my battery was out of power, it really wasn't.  Somehow it wasn't monitoring it properly.  I decided to just keep using the battery until it really died, to see how long it would last.  Altogether it ended up lasting over 2 hours before the computer completely shut down.

I was thinking I needed to find a way to re-set the power monitor so it would read my battery properly, but the next time I ran the computer on battery, it seemed to keep track of it just fine.  I guess completely discharging the battery did the re-setting for me.  Aren't electronics fun?  Several times in the past I ran the computer on battery after it told me it was low and went to Stand-by, but usually only for a couple minutes because I was afraid to let it go too long and completely die.  Obviously, that is exactly what it needed, so I'm going to have to make sure I discharge the battery completely every once in a while.