I am charging my laptop with one of the “quick charging” phone chargers right now, currently it says 5 hours until full charge. Does this wear out the battery faster or something? Or does it make no difference apart from taking a little bit longer?

  • NateNate60@lemmy.world
    17·
    3 days ago

    If you are using the laptop at the same time, there is a chance that the charger may not provide enough power to the computer to operate and force it to temporarily draw from the battery to supplement the power from the charger. This causes additional wear on the battery.

    For example, if you plug in a 15 W charger and the computer wants to draw 20 W, it will draw it from the battery. Spikes in power consumption are not uncommon during ordinary use as the CPU will temporarily engage turbo mode during certain tasks, such as when it is loading a Web page or starting a program. Depending on your operating system, plugging the charger in may also cause the OS to disable battery conservation features which leads to more frequent spikes in power consumption.

    None of this would be a problem if, for example, your charger delivered 45 W of power, because during those spikes, it just means the battery receives slightly less power as more of it is consumed by the computer.

    If you are not using the laptop at the same time as you are charging it, I can’t think of any potential negative effects.

    • ji59@hilariouschaos.comEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      I think there should be written somewhere what the computer needs. For example 20V 3A ~ 60W. I don’t know how much voltage the super fast phone chargers have, but looking only at power isn’t enough.

      Just for curious readers: I noticed some annoyance with my laptop, it has 100W mode, but only with the original charger. So just plugging it into a dock with original charger attached limits the laptop to 65W only. And if I tried (mainly out of curiosity) charging with an insufficient phone charger, CPU switched to 300MHz and everything got very laggy. The same thing happened when I connected two of the USB ports together :D

      • NateNate60@lemmy.world
        6·
        3 days ago

        The required input for the computer is usually inscribed on the chassis at the bottom. However, the text is usually faint and can be easily rubbed off after the computer has been used for some time. Mine says 20 V 2.25 A.

        • ji59@hilariouschaos.comEnglish
          2·
          3 days ago

          There are also supported outputs on a charger, and usually the maximum power output mode is the same as the optimal input for a laptop it came with.