Leave Laptop Plugged in Everyday or Charge 30-80%?

Title.

When working at home every day, is it better to leave a laptop plugged in all the time? I know that modern laptops tend to draw ‘working power’ directly from the charger/power supply, rather than drawing from the battery. Does this mean that leaving the laptop plugged in all day will have less strain on the battery?

Or does the 99-100% charging of the battery throughout the day cause significant stress, so that it’s better to charge and discharge 30-80% throughout the day?

Thanks

You can keep your laptop plugged in all the time, but you have to limit your charging capacity to 80%.

Broderick said:
You can keep your laptop plugged in all the time, but you have to limit your charging capacity to 80%.

Yes, but not all laptops allow this. It’s a firmware feature and so cannot be added with a software utility. You typically need the manufacturer’s own utility (e.g., Lenovo Vantage) to access this feature, or often it’s in the BIOS as well.

Virtually all Dell, Lenovo, and Asus laptops support this; HP enterprise laptops (EliteBook/ProBook) also do, but their consumer laptops generally don’t.

@Atlas
In some HP consumer-grade laptops, you can restrict charging capacity through the BIOS.
How to limit laptop battery charging to 80%? - HP Support Community

Refer to this article for more info.

@Broderick
This applies to very, very few models, and no current models in the Pavilion/Envy/Spectre lines, as far as I know.

@Atlas
I’m just curious, does anyone know of a way to do this on an HP ZBook 15 G3?

Brett said:
@Atlas
I’m just curious, does anyone know of a way to do this on an HP ZBook 15 G3?

It’s in the BIOS settings. There’s a power or power management submenu, then it’s something like “Optimize for battery health,” which locks the charging at 80%. The battery meter in Windows will still go to 100%, but that 100% is 80% of the design capacity. You can verify this by running powercfg -batteryreport in Command Prompt.

If your laptop supports the 80% charging limit, turn that on and keep it plugged in all the time. Once a month, charge from 20% to 100%. This really works. My laptop is around 4 years old and still has 80% capacity. Kinda the same use case—85% of the time, I use the laptop plugged in, and when I go out, I use it on battery power.

@Xan
I mean, my laptop is from 2015 and has spent most of its life plugged in and running at 100% battery with no charging limit and no special care taken, and it still shows 82% battery capacity.

¿Por qué no los dos?

Basically, every time you go to 100%, you lose a tiny bit of max battery capacity. It adds up after a while. If you really care about preserving the battery for the long run, don’t go past 80%.