While the portability of laptops is the main reason they’ve grown increasingly popular, that portability comes a price, namely rechargeable batteries. Not only do these batteries limit how long you can use the computer away from a power outlet, they gradually lose their ability to hold a charge.

Battery Health Monitor: Another freeware option, not quite as pretty as CoconutBattery, but gives you most of the same information. Battery Health Monitor has a grid at the top that shows you the power status of the laptop. When plugged in, the word “A/C Power” is bold for example; when on battery power, the word is grayed out.

Other indicators include “Battery Depleted” and “Not Chargeable,” neither of which you’ll want to see bolded. Battery Health Monitor also tells you how many charge cycles the battery has gone through as well as the current voltage the battery is delivering.

SlimBatteryMonitor: This piece of freeware is essentially a fancy replacement for Apple’s laptop battery icon.

While it does not provide any of the supplemental data the other options do, SlimBatteryMonitor’s main attraction is that it takes up less space in the menu bar than Apple’s built-in version and is much more customizable, particularly in the colors you can choose for the battery icon…

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Wow! It’s Wednesday’s IT Blogwatch: in which we’re really, really excited about a notebook battery that lasts 30 years. Not to mention an awful, awful performance from Commander Riker hawking enterprise IT automation software…

A breathless Next Energy News reports:

Your next laptop could have a continuous power battery that lasts for 30 years without a single recharge thanks to work being funded by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. The breakthrough betavoltaic power cells are constructed from semiconductors and use radioisotopes as the energy source. As the radioactive material decays it emits beta particles that transform into electric power capable of fueling an electrical device like a laptop for years.
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Betavoltaics generate power when an electron strikes a particular interface between two layers of material. The Process uses beta electron emissions that occur when a neutron decays into a proton which causes a forward bias in the semiconductor. This makes the betavoltaic cell a forward bias diode of sorts, similar in some respects to a photovoltaic (solar) cell. Electrons scatter out of their normal orbits in the semiconductor and into the circuit creating a usable electric current… [more]

Addy Dugdale digs it:

Made from radioactive material … the batteries end their life being completely inert and non-toxic, so they’re not as scary-bad as they sound … Before you all run for the tinfoil, the batteries don’t use fission or fusion, nor are there any chemical processes to produce energy, which means no radioactive or hazardous waste … Small and thin, the batteries use a porous silicon material to collect the hydrogen isotope tritium that is generated in the process. And as it’s a non-thermal reaction, your laptop will stay cooler than if its juice came from traditional lithium-ion batteries… [more]

Rupert Goodwins, the first ever blogger scoffs:

Sadly, no. As with the best techno-rubbish, there is a story in there, but you’ll be pootling around the skies in jetpacks before you’re powering your Dell from neutron decay.
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Tritium’s half-life is around twelve years, so every decade or so your battery will halve in power … the sort of atomic structures that generate power when bombarded with high energy electrons are the sort that tend to fall apart when bombarded with high energy electrons … there’s the small problem that if you break the battery during its life the nasties come out … they don’t have a great conversion efficiency. Around 25 percent is the best you can get - which is pretty good, but leaves 75 percent sloshing around as heat. That means a 25 watt battery will get plenty warm … Even the latest devices, which are very clever in the way they saturate a porous structure with the gas and thus usefully capture quite a large number of the energetic electrons, have an energy density of the order of twenty five watts per kilo. Lithium ion batteries, the sort you have in your laptop, manage 1.8 kilowatts per kilo… [more]

Full story ComputerWorld.com

Lithium Ion notebook batteries wear down because of two factors:

1. active usage in your notebook battery
2. natural aging of the notebook battery

Both will wear down your notebook battery over time; the trick is to minimize their impact while still getting the performance out of your laptop battery that you need.

The most important thing to understand about laptop batteries is that they are always losing a small bit of their charge. The hotter the temperature, the faster notebook batteries loose their charge. So rule number one is: keep your notebook battery cool. Notebook battery manufacturers store their products at around 60F.

The second most important thing to understand about notebook batteries is that their capacity decreases with each cycle of charging and discharging. By itself, this is not surprising - but when combined with the previous point, it leads to a surprising conclusion.

When laptop users leave their laptop battery inside the machine but leave the computer plugged into the wall, the laptop battery is going through a constant charge-discharge cycle. The notebook battery is sitting unused inside the notebook, discharging a little faster than normal because of the notebook’s heat. Once its charge level drops to a predetermined level, the AC adapter provides extra juice to “top off” the notebook battery. As the laptop battery gets older, it tends to self-discharge a little faster, which accelerates the process even further…

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