Bought X60S, now wondering about the battery discharging

I got this awesome laptop but I have some question about battery usage:

As guided I first charged it to full charge. Then after some usage with adapter connected I wanted to benchmark the battery. Somewhere I remembered that the battery should be discharged fully in the first few times, so I also disabled the option of having hibernation at 3%. Now when the battery got to 0% it just kept going on. I also looked at the power management that indeed 0 Wh is left (the battery had been running at this point for 6 hours with medium usage). I got kind of 'worried' at this point and started searching for info and i came up with some info that battery can indeed become over-discharged or change polarity if discharged too much.

So I just started charging it again. Did I do wrong?

 

You should be fine. If you want to discharge and charge again, just use the Power Manager to reset the battery. They have that option. Resetting the battery will fully charge it, discharge it, and then charge it again. It makes the meter accurate.

Also read the Battery Guide here on NBR for more info.

 

If you want the battery to last...*don't* completely discharge it.

Li-ion batteries totally hate being deep cycled.

 

But what does completely discharging mean, discharge until the laptop just shuts down?

 

Yeah, until the laptop goes into standby due to very low power. You only want to do this every 30 cycles(to recalibrate the battery meter) and refrain from doing it otherwise. I recently ruined my laptop battery by discharging it all the way several times, and now only lasts for 50% of the time. When you discharge, you should try to refrain from going below 20% or 15% battery life to ensure the battery life doesn't deteriorate. You also may want to adjust your power settings to take care of that automatically for you as well.

 

No I don't mean standby, you can change the time it goes to standby (usually it's 5-10%). I mean that the laptop shuts down simply because it doesn't have any power left. That's what I understand as complete discharging.

 

Usually the laptop goes into hibernation or standby mode on its own. That would be better than it shutting down like you are suggesting, but both scenarios are indicative of the fact that the battery is completely discharged. Be sure to take heed to what I said in my last post as well.