Something strange happened to my laptop's battery

A few weeks ago I got to the office and noticed something peculiar: my XPS’ battery had around 7 remaining hours of life, while until the week earlier I had never seen it above 3 hours.

This is the (very short) story of how I supercharged my laptop’s battery without even knowing how to.

A bit of background

Last month I flew to the most beautiful continent in the world with the idea of spending a whole week doing safaris in Tanzania’s national parks.

Suffice to say I wasn’t super excited about bringing my laptop with me, mainly because:

• I’d be on a jeep the whole time, and carrying it with me would make no sense, since I’d just put it under a lot of stress
• I spent most of my nights at a camp that did not have any internet access at all, so good luck getting online regardless

Eventually, I decided to leave the laptop at home, something I hadn’t done since a few years. Gone for a good week…

Once I got home, I noticed something interesting: the light that signals the battery level is low was blinking — “probably got drained over the week”, I thought.

Plugged in my charger, waited until the laptop was fully charged, then the miracle happened: since then, the battery life has been extended by ¾ hours at least (you might think that’s not crazy, but for a battery that used to give me ¾ hours of love at most, being able to do 6/8 hours in a row is a blessing).

How did this happen?

Frankly, I do not know. I’ve always been a big believer of letting the battery work “at full capacity”, meaning that I let it drain as much as possible before charging it until it’s completely full.

I think this week-long draining session, without small charges in between, has allowed the battery to calibrate (?) better, or god-knows-what. Right now, being left with 20% of battery means I can still go on for a couple of hours:

All I know is that I have a better battery¹, and I owe it to going on a vacation and being able to “disconnect”. Probably, the underlying lesson is that it’s good to disconnect once a year :)

Adios!