laptop's battery life

Lithium-ion Battery
Most of the laptops now a day are equipped with Lithium-ion batteries. Though there are Nickel-cadmium, Nickel metal hydride, etc, after the invention of Lithium-ion battery, because of its efficiency most of the laptop manufacturers are selling it along with their respective laptops.

Why Lithium-ion battery? Because it provides high energy density, runtime, and is light in weight. To run a power-sucking laptop, a battery with high energy density is required. The runtime of a laptop battery is based on what sort of applications you run. If you run basic applications for writing, reading, copying, chatting, etc, then your laptop battery runtime will be high compared to running a complex application that has a huge number crunching requirement.

The Problem
The problem with the laptop battery arises when you start using your laptop as a Desktop Replacement. In other words, regularly using the laptop for extended hours (say 10/12 hours) on AC power along with the battery plugged-in. If you are using alternatively both the AC power and battery for long hours regularly, then there are so many chances that your battery life will go down. It is not because of your alternative usage with AC power, but by the heat that gets generated by your laptop during its operation. The life of a battery is more dependent on the temperature rather than its regular charging and discharging functions.

On an average, a laptop battery (genuine!) will provide service for 1-1.5 years even if you use it roughly without taking any precautionary measures. You can extend your battery's life by more than 2 years if you follow the following said measures.

Precautionary Measures
The only solution to extend your laptop battery's precious lifetime is to use it only when you are in need of it. Means, if you have AC power available for your power requirements and you are using laptop as your Desktop Replacement, then remove the battery from your laptop after charging it moderately (40%), wrap it in a plastic cover, and store it in a cool place. After every 3 weeks, religiously, plug-in your battery into your laptop and charge it for sometime before you switch from your AC power to your battery. For the next few hours, allow you laptop to suck power from your battery until it gets drained of all its stored power and shuts down you laptop. Then, plug-in the AC power into your laptop, start charging your battery up to a moderate level (say 40%), switch off your laptop to remove the battery and store it in a cool place after wrapping it in a plastic cover. You need to do this religiously for every 3 weeks in order to extend your laptop battery's life considerably by 2 more years.