Can I leave my laptop running all the time?
Hi everyone.
Leo Notenboom, here for AskLeo.com. Here's the question.
"My computer is in use most of the day.
Will a laptop handle being on for so many hours every day?"
The short answer is sure, mine are typically on 24 hours, seven days a week.
But the longer answer is more complex because there's a trade off involved.
And that trade off is something that you
at least want to consider before you decide how long to leave your laptop on.
Now, to be clear, leaving it on during the day for your work.
If you're working for an eight hour shift or a twelve hour shift or whatever it is
during the day you're using your laptop, you should probably leave it on while
you're working, especially if it's the kind of a thing
where you'd find yourself turning it off and turning it on.
Turning it off and turning it on multiple times a day.
That's not worth it.
Leave it on if you need to.
What we're really looking at here then is
at the end of the day, when you're done for the day,
do you turn it off or can you leave it running like I do 24 hours a day?
The answer, like I said, it's complicated.
What it all boils down to is battery life.
By leaving your laptop plugged in all
the time, which is required for it to be running.
A laptop battery typically doesn't last
an entire work day, so for that to have happened,
you'll have to have plugged it in at some point and left it plugged in.
My laptops, as I said,
they're running 24/7, which means that for the most part they're plugged in 24/7.
By leaving it plugged in all the time,
you're ultimately making a decision to shorten the battery life.
And by battery life, I mean mostly
the number of years of useful life you're going to get out of that battery.
It does end up impacting the amount
of the number of hours the battery will power your laptop.
But in the long run, what will happen is that will get shorter
and shorter and shorter over time, which it will do anyway.
But it will get shorter and shorter faster by leaving it plugged in all the time.
Meaning then that you'll need to replace
the battery or the laptop sooner than if you were unplugging it and plugging it in,
unplugging it for long periods of time, and then plugging it in only to recharge.
Now we do have to be really clear that batteries die.
They do. Using a battery wears it out.
The real question here is how fast, how quickly will the battery wear out?
Now, I'm not going to try and give you
absolute rules because battery technology keeps changing.
Batteries today are better about this than batteries five or even ten years ago.
But the short answer is, in a sense,
there's some percentage less than 100 where you want to keep the battery
charged, you want to use it down to some other percentage.
I use 80% as a maximum, 10% as a minimum, just something so that you're exercising
the entire range of the battery's capacity on a regular basis.
Make sure to use a charger that is matched
specifically for that battery, which typically means using the battery
and the charger that came with your laptop.
And perhaps as importantly,
perhaps even more importantly, don't let it get too hot or too cold.
Mostly too hot.
Heat will, in fact, also shorten the battery's lifespan.
Keeping the battery at 100% charged all the time is not ideal.
As I said, that's kind of sort of how you shorten the lifespan of a battery.
Now, from a very pragmatic point of view.
And the reason that I'm totally,
totally okay with leaving my laptops plugged in all the time is that battery
technology, as I said, has been improving to the point where today
the battery technology battery life, even as abusive as I seem to be to it,
often exceeds the usable lifespan of the laptop itself.
By that I mean the laptop as great as your laptop is today, five years from now,
it'll seem slow, not because it got slower, but because the world got faster.
The expectations of the world require more than a five year old laptop.
So by that time, you may be in the market for a new laptop anyway.
I know I will be.
What that means, though, is the fact that the battery
in that laptop at that time may not hold the same charge that it used to may not
matter, because I'll be getting a new laptop anyway.
And when I repurpose a laptop,
I generally repurpose it to be at a desktop role anyway.
I have, I think, three laptops right now.
Only one of them is one that I expect to travel with.
The other two, not only are they plugged in,
they're on.
They never move 24/7.
And in fact,
one of them I don't physically see 24/7 because I connect to it remotely.
It's in an obscure room in my house for various reasons.
So the bottom line here is that this may
or may not be something you even need to worry about.
If you want to maximize the life of your battery, then for sure,
unplug it for a while, run it on battery for a while,
run down the battery for a while, and then plug it back into charge.
Certainly, running your computer, just leaving it running throughout
the entire time or even 24 hours a day not going to hurt your computer.
It's the charging cycle here that we need to be careful about.
It's the charging cycle that's going to impact your battery's lifespan.
And as I said, it may not matter.
Depending on the machine,
you've got the age that happens to be the battery technology involved.
There's a really really good chance
that using the laptop in the way that makes the most sense for you.
Whether that be leaving it plugged in or
unplugging, it is probably the right decision for you.
I hope that helps. For updates for related Links for comments and more visit
askleo.com/30552. I'm Leo Notenboom and this is Askleo.com. Thanks for watching.