You can toss out your old laptop or cell phone batteries when they start to go bad, or if you want you can recondition them for a little more life. Think of all the batteries that could have been used longer than their normal life cycle if they were only reconditioned back to life.
What can you do to extend the life of your cell phone or lap top battery? When you charge your battery, how often has it been fully discharged, probably not very often. Many times we plug them in to recharge them before they go dead so we are not cut off in the middle of a conversation if the battery dies.
This is good to do but recharging the battery when it still has juice can sometimes shorten the useful lifespan of your battery. It may just be the microprocessor in the battery that does this but that's the case. For a simple way to get more life from your battery try this procedure.
1. The first step is to let your device run out of power to where it turns itself off. Let it sit for about 10 minutes then turn it on again and let it turn off a second time on its own.
2. Now charge it back up again to full charge. When the indicator light tells you its fully charged let it go for another 30 minutes.
3. Let your device run out of battery power again and repeat these steps three times. For your phone just leave it on till the battery dies, do not turn it off. For your laptop you should make sure that that it is out of hibernation mode so it stays on while you let the battery discharge.
Doing this will get you more use out the battery and you may be able to do this procedure a couple more times. The battery will eventually get to where you can not extend it any more but at least you got more life out of it.