"NY" wrote in message
o.uk...
"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
news
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),

I mostly use mine like that in the kitchen and have it hibernate when you
close 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.

I used to run it on the battery when bottling the beer but don't
anymore, I listen to podcasts on the phone when doing that now.

As things are now, I always have to boot from scratch if I move the
laptop, because as well as the battery dying,

I got a double capacity battery more than a decade ago
so it would do the day's beer brewing on battery and it
has just died. Went back to the original battery, fixed that.

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.

I never had it on that ancient laptop.

If the laptop wasn't unbearably slow in everything it does,

Yeah, it's a problem. But only really noticeable
when I need to do a full reboot when its XP
eventually gets too screwed every few months.

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.

Never had to do it with mine.

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.

Running which OS ?