How to Restore a Dead or Dying Laptop Battery. 4 Steps

Laptop batteries are expensive pieces of equipment Luckily, there are a lot of ways, some technical, some interesting and some

strange ones, that people have come up with to restore dying laptops batteries.

In this article, I'm going to try to list out all the different ones I've read about. If you have tried to restore a laptop battery yourself, let us know your method in the comments.

 Step 1 – The Freezing Method

I once saw in a movie where a guys' phone was about to die, so he took out the battery and stuck in some snow, which apparently made it last longer! I still don't know if that's true or
not, but apparently you can freeze a laptop battery and get more juice out of it. Here's the procedure:

 1.Take your battery out and place it in a sealed Ziploc or plastic bag.

  2. Go ahead and put the bag into your freezer and leave it there for about 12 hours.

Some people suggest leaving it for longer, but I wouldn't leave it for more than 24 hours.

  3. Once you take it out, remove the plastic bag and let the battery warm up until it reaches room temperature. 

 Be sure to wrap it in a towel and wipe away any condensation as it
warms up.

 4. Reinsert the laptop battery and charge it completely.

  5.Once charged, unplug the power and let the battery drain all the way down.

Now repeat steps 4 and 5 at least 4 times: charge all the way to full, then discharge completely. That should be it! Unless your battery is leaking acid, you should get some kind of bump in the battery life.
Note that you should only perform this on NiCD or NiMH batteries. 

If you try this on a lithium battery, it'll make the battery life worse.
Unfortunately, there is no way to restore a lithium battery. You'll have to find your laptop specs to see what kind of battery you have. For lithium ion batteries, you can't restore, but you can possibly extend the life of a battery.

Step 2 – Cool Your Computer

If you have a lithium ion based battery, you can increase it's life by making sure your laptop is cool. If you have a laptop that gets really hot, it can damage the battery and cause the shortness in battery life. I have an old Sony VAIO laptop and I saw a significant increase in laptop battery life when I bought a laptop cooling pad off Amazon. You can get for $20.

You may think your battery is on it's last life but it could simply be that it's getting too warm and therefore loses charge faster.

  Step 3 – Recalibrate Your Battery

With most newer batteries, this is no longer necessary, but if your battery is dying, then it's probably a pretty old battery. In that case, you may benefit from a recalibration. Recalibrating a battery is done because sometimes the operating system cannot figure out how much capacity is left in the battery. 

This can happen if the laptop is always plugged in or if the battery was never let to die all the way. You can tell whether your battery needs calibration if your battery never charges to 100% (say only to 95%) or if the OS says you have 35 min of battery remaining, but the computer dies either much sooner or much later

 A lot of manufacturers have released calibration tools for specific laptop models, so first perform a Google search with your
computer model + battery calibration. 

 Step 4 – Unplug at Full Battery

The last option you can try is to let the battery charge to 100% and then simply unplug the computer. When it gets close to dying, i.e. less than 5%, go ahead and plug it in and let it charge up. 

However, this could reduce battery life on newer lithium ion batteries, so for those batteries it's suggested you only let the battery level drop to 35% to 45% and then charge it back up to 75% to 85%. Sounds crazy, but apparently that will give you the best battery life because it won't use up as many charge and recharge cycles.

Again, this method also requires a bit of work, but it's worth a try if you really want to increase your battery life. Have you used any
other methods not mentioned here to increase your laptop battery life? If so, let us know in the comments. Enjoy!