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"Best practices" (?) with laptop battery driving me crazy (lemmy.ml)

submitted 8 months ago by zdhzm2pgp@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.ml

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Ok, well, to start with, my Lenovo X1 Carbon 10th is known for not having the greatest battery life.

Despite this, to preserve battery health, I have notifications set to warn me when a charge goes under 20% or over 90%, so that I either plug in or unplug when I get them, which TTBOMK constitutes "best practices." Very possibly I'm just getting old and getting lost too deeply in whatever I'm doing, but I feel like I'm constantly getting these notifications, and they're really starting to get on my nerves!

I've tried tlp and auto-cpufreq without any noticeable difference in performance, and usually I'm on "Power Saver" in Mint.

Mrs. Erinaceus has a gaming laptop and just keeps it plugged in all the time, battery health be damned. Is that what I should do? Maybe time to get a new battery? Or is there just some way to tell it to stop charging and leave it plugged in?

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[–] spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

You have a number of options...

Your Lenovo is supposed to have charge limiting capabilities that are configurable in the UEFI. If it's not configurable through the UEFI interface, the Thinkpad Vantage Windows app has the ability to set charge limits on most of Lenovo's laptops and settings made there will likely persist when running Linux.

There are also charge limiting capabilities built into TLP that may work, as well as a specialized Thinkpad kernel .

If all else fails you can protect the battery using an inexpensive smart plug that's controlled by the OS. I have an HP laptop that lacks any kind of battery management capabilities and I've set it up so it maintains the battery charge at 80%. Linux controls the plug with HTTP commands that are triggered by configurable charge levels. It works well.