How to Preserve Battery Health in a Gaming Laptop

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I get it, you’re concerned about the longevity of your battery. All too often you get a shiny new laptop, a year goes by, and the battery has gotten significantly worse. We are always left thinking what we could have done to prevent that.

Gaming laptops are especially susceptible to battery damage because they are often left plugged in for an extended amount of time and can get extremely hot. Both of which can cause a serious decrease to the battery’s health and ability to hold a charge.

Since gaming laptops already have a short battery life to begin with, we want be to extra careful in how we treat their batteries. Not to worry, though. Follow the tips below and you can extend the life of your gaming laptop battery for years to come.

Related: 9 Gaming Laptops with Incredible Battery Life.

Contents [hide]

• 1 Battery Charging Best Practices
  • 1.1 Keep Your Battery Charged Between 20%-80%
  • 1.2 Avoid Leaving Laptop Battery Fully Charged
  • 1.3 Don’t Let the Battery Hit 0%
• 2 How to Prevent Laptop From Charging to Full
  • 2.1 Use Your Laptop’s Bios to Limit Charging Levels
  • 2.2 Use Lenovo Vantage to Limit Charging Levels
  • 2.3 Use Asus Battery Health Charging App
• 3 Make Sure Your Gaming Laptop is Not Overheating

Battery Charging Best Practices

Keep Your Battery Charged Between 20%-80%

According to a study done by Battery University, keeping your laptop charged between 20%-80% could help increase the amount of charge cycles the battery can withstand by 300-1,000.

While the optimal range for battery preservation is to keep it charged between 40-60%, this isn’t really practical for normal use of a laptop. Therefore, it’s best to aim for 20-80% range in everyday use. This will allow for enough battery life to get your tasks done while doing minimal damage to the battery.

Avoid Leaving Laptop Battery Fully Charged

Batteries do not like to be at full charge all the time. Leaving the battery at full charge for too long will decrease the batteries capacity over time faster, compared to leaving it in the 20-80% range.

Don’t Let the Battery Hit 0%

Letting the battery become fully depleted is something you should really try to avoid. A study by Cadex found that a Lithium Ion battery would degrade from 88-94% to 73-84% after just 250 full discharge and recharge cycles.

That is some pretty fast degradation of the battery. For a smart phone, which is typically charged and discharged once a day, the battery capacity would be flirting with Apple’s definition of “needing to be replaced” after less than a year.

How to Prevent Laptop From Charging to Full

Use Your Laptop’s Bios to Limit Charging Levels

Many laptops will allow you to limit the amount of charge the battery will go to before preventing charging further. For example, Dell allows you to do this by changing the start and stop charging thresholds in the bios. Here are the steps to do it in Dell (and it will be similar for other laptops if they allow you to do this in the bios).

1. Restart your Dell computer and enter the bios by tapping F2 as it turns on.
2. Inside the bios, select the Battery Setting page. Then select Custom.
3. Set the Start Charging to 20%
4. Set the Stop Charging to 80%
5. Click Ok to apply your settings

You can also choose to input your own start and stop points based on your own preferences and use cases.

Use Lenovo Vantage to Limit Charging Levels

Lenovo Vantage is a great multipurpose tool that has the ability to optimize your charging if you leave your laptop plugged in all the time. The only downside to the software is you can only use it on Lenovo computers.

Lenovo recommends that if you leave your laptop plugged in all the time, you should set the charging thresholds inside the vantage app to optimize battery health.

Use Asus Battery Health Charging App

Much like Lenovo’s Vantage app, Asus offers their own software to handle battery charging optimization. Also like Lenovo’s, it is unfortunately only available to Asus laptop owners.

Asus recommends that if you are going to leave it plugged in all the time, you should set the battery mode to “maximize lifespan”. This will stop charging when the laptop hits 60% battery and start charging when it drops below 58%.

Generally, each laptop manufacturer is going to have their own software to handle battery charging optimization. If they don’t, you should be able to do it in the bios.

Make Sure Your Gaming Laptop is Not Overheating

Not allowing your computer to get too hot is arguably one of the most important aspects of battery health. Just take a look at this data from Battery University.

Looking at the data, if your battery were to maintain 25°C and be charged to 100% all the time, it drops to a whopping 80% capacity after one year. That is a drastic difference from a temperature that is relatively normal for gaming laptops to achieve.

Therefore, it’s really important to keep your gaming laptop cooled properly, in combination with our other tips from above.

We could talk about how to keep your gaming laptop cool in an entire other article because there is so much to talk about. And that’s exactly what we did! Learn everything you need to keeping your gaming laptop cool here:

Related: 5 Tips to Keep Your Gaming Laptop Cool.