Laptop battery / should they be initially conditioned

I recently asked the question about laptop batteries here.
The people who replied at the time seemed to think it was unnecessary to do anything special with a new laptop battery.

I've had a pretty poor run with laptop batteries throughout the years.
I eventually decided to break in my new laptop battery. So far, it's performing good.

I have a Dell Laptop and have done this on a couple of occasions, with no idea if it makes any difference,

hsehestedt said:

They may play with the numbers, but it is based upon the voltage. On my ASUS laptop, I have the ability to limit the charge to 60% or 80% and as a result the charge level never shows as higher than 60% or 80% when those options are set. They could, of course, consider those as being 100% charged and call it that, but no we are simply redefining what the 100% charge point is.

Click to expand...

It's based on the voltage alright, but my point was that it's based on it in such a way that the logical relationship that exists between the voltage and it is nonlinear, as the thing that factually matters is the (nominal) amount of energy (Wh = watt-hours) that you can expect the battery to be able to (still) deliver. My 5 years old Medion P6678 laptop (Intel Core i5-7200U) also has the ability to limit the charge, and, so does my 8 years and a half old Asus X550LD laptop (Intel Core i7-4510U) so, I am already quite familiar with that ability. But my other point was that, if the laptop manufacturer considers 100% as being a voltage that is already significantly lower than the voltage that you had assumed it would be, then the aforementioned ability might simply not be needed anymore. Laptop manufacturers have already started to move away from it, as fast charging "smart batteries" have been getting increasingly popular in recent years so, the tech industry just never ceases to evolve. For better. Or worse.

hsehestedt said:

This is the reason you can transfer a Li-Ion battery from one device to another and get an accurate charge level reading right away on the device it was transferred to.

The fact that we can determine charge level by the voltage is a huge advantage of Li-Ion. I used to own laptops back when the batteries were nickel metal hydride and even before that nickel cadmium. It was almost impossible to get good charge level readings out of those due the behaviors of those chemistries.

Click to expand...

There's typically a battery profile stored in the device's own internal firmware so it can keep track of the parameters to make up the curve [to define the nonlinear relationship I was talking about earlier] with decent accuracy levels. I quit using NiCd and NiMH batteries a very long time ago. I own a SkyRC MC3000 battery charger, I use it for charging Li-ion round cells to whatever the voltage I want to charge them to. Not for laptops of course, but my other hobby is vaping mechanical mods at (very) high power levels. The cells I use for this purpose are the (very) high drain variety of Li-ion round cells, definitely not the same as what's commonly found in laptops. So, the technology is different, but there are a lot of parallels. Anyway. I have done way more research on the subject of Li-ion round cells than the vast majority of people have done. (Even though I still don't consider myself an expert.)

hsehestedt said:

At least the metal hydride was a big improvement in that you didn't have to constantly discharge them fully to avoid memory effects. I modified a laptop by replacing NiCd cells with NiMh batteries before any commercially available NiMh batteries were available in laptops. As a result of that change, I was able to sell that laptop used for way more than I bought it new.

Click to expand...

It wasn't until the end of 2008 that I started to buy laptops. Li-ion batteries in laptops were already common back then, but replacing Vista with Win 7 also doubled the value. LOL!