"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
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AFAIK batteries hold 1000 charges, or 4-8 years, whichever is the soonest.
4-8 years meaning they're not so good after 4 years, but still usable till
8. So if you usually use the laptop plugged in and rarely on battery, it
should last 8 years. Modern rechargeables don't have a memory effect, so
only half using them isn't bad for them any more. I've never come across
a laptop which has a battery problem younger than about 5 years old. How
often do you run it to 1/3 full? You should be able to do that 1500
times, or 3 times a day in 2 years.

I probably use my laptop mainly on mains (unplugging when I shutdown or
hibernate it), using battery mainly for the fairly short time when I'm
moving the laptop from one place in the house to another, or when taking it
to someone else's house and it's easier not to be tethered to mains.

As things are now, I always have to boot from scratch if I move the laptop,
because as well as the battery dying, the ability to hibernate (save current
computer state to *disk*) as opposed to sleep (keep RAM powered-up) has
mysteriously disappeared with "enable/disable hybrid sleep" greyed-out.

If the laptop wasn't unbearably slow in everything it does, I'd a) buy a new
battery, even if only a cheap clone, b) restore it to factory state and
reinstall and customise it again (as I've already had to do twice when it
took longer and longer to boot and started randomly pausing on trivial tasks
like switching focus from one window to another. I do PC support for other
people as a living, but all my standard "tricks" have not made much
improvement on my own PC: a PC with loads of free memory shouldn't have
times when it hammers the disk as if it's swapping to page file and its CPU
usage on system (ie not user-initiated) tasks shoots up to nearly 100%. And
that's before I try to do CPU-hungry things like playing HD video.