It’s impossible to avoid the life of any lithium battery declining over time. Eventually your laptop that once ran on battery power for 3+ hours will only last under an hour before you need to connect the power adapter.

I recently purchased a new MacBook Pro and have been researching the best ways to prolong my battery life and the most efficient way to use my Magsafe power adapter. Here’s what I was able to gather up.

You should disconnect the power adapter once your laptop is fully charged and wait until your system gives you warning as “Now your running in reserved batter power” or “Low Battery” use that as a notice to connect your power adapter. Running a charge through your battery that is already fully charged not only wastes electricity but runs unnecessary energy through your battery which can eventually cause damage.

Best method to prolong your battery life is to calibrate you batter every 2 months to increase the capacity and life, if you use your laptop Daily, Follow as below.

Calibrating a MacBook or MacBook Pro battery
Calibrate the battery in your MacBook every month or two to keep your battery functioning at its fullest capacity.

To calibrate the battery:

0. Plug in the MagSafe power adapter and fully charge the MacBook or MacBook Pro battery until the light on the MagSafe connector changes to green and the Battery icon in the menu bar indicates that the battery is fully charged.
1. Allow the battery to rest in the fully charged state for two hours or longer. You may use your computer during this time as long as the power adapter is plugged in.
2. Disconnect the power adapter with the computer on and start using it with battery power. When the battery’s charge gets low, you’ll see the low battery warning dialog on the screen. Continue to keep your computer turned on, save your work and close all applications when the battery’s charge gets too low the computer goes to sleep.
   Turn off the computer or allow it to sleep for five hours or longer.
3. Reconnect the power adapter and leave it connected until the battery is fully charged. You may use your computer during this time.

Tags: lithium battery, MacBook Pro

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 1:34 pm and is filed under Howto. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.