A cell phone or laptop battery
that has lost its "staying power" or ability to hold a charge for an
extended period is a nuisance and can be costly to replace. There are
steps you can take to help return some life to those old batteries, with
a little patience and an adherence to these steps.
Steps
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Make sure the battery is completely exhausted. Let your electronic device turn off by itself once the battery is "dead". It is important to start the process from this position because what you are really doing here is calibrating your device to know how much "juice" is in the battery. Your device needs to know what an exhausted battery "feels like", to know what the battery's range of charge can be.
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Plug your device in and let it charge until it signifies you have charged it "completely". Four bars on a cell phone, full battery on a laptop, whatever it may say, it is probably wrong - and you should be able to tell because the device will not hold a charge for as long as you would like.
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Remove the battery from the device. You should allow a few (5-10) seconds to pass to let any static charge in the device to dissipate before you put it back in.
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Replace the battery in the device.
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Reattach the device to its charger. In most cases the device will again tell you that it is charging. Depending on the degradation of the battery, this charge MAY take as long as the initial charge did, or longer. Patience is paramount to success. Once the device again tells you it is fully charged.
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Remove and replace the battery until the device only takes a few seconds to tell you it is fully charged after plugging it into its charger. Each time you replace the battery and begin charging it again the time it takes for the device to tell you "Fully Charged" should be decreased. This is really where your patience is needed. You should not let the device stand idly telling you "Full Charge" for too long during this process. Try to stay involved with the device and your execution of these steps.
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'Turn on the device and let it exhaust the battery through normal usage. Once you reach this point your battery should already display new life and last longer than before you started this process. Again it is important to let the battery fully "die" before you reattach the charger. Once your device has "died" and you "Fully Charge" it again, you may repeat steps 3-6 to determine whether or not the device is actually "Fully Charged".
