Well, to be fair, your laptop’s batteries probably aren’t completely dead. But since Lithium Ion batteries tend to lose about 20% of their capacity each year, a typical three-year-old laptop might only get about an hour or so on a charge, which might not even get your folks through an entire meeting. Here is a great tip to forestall the day that you need to replace those batteries:

Recondition your battery regularly. Most laptop manufacturers don’t generally tell you about this, but a simple process known as reconditioning (or occasionally, recalibrating) can breathe new life into your laptop battery and add capacity back. To do that, turn off your screen saver and any other power management tools which put your PC to sleep. Fully charge the laptop, and then let it run all the way down — right until it powers down due to lack of juice. Then charge it back up again and restore your power management stuff. Do this every few months (such as three times a year).

A calibration cycle requires that the battery be completely charged and then completely discharged. During the calibration cycle, the power management properties must be disabled to allow the battery to completely discharge.

Follow the steps below to calibrate the battery power meter readings.
1.Connect the AC adapter and allow the battery to charge to 99% – 100% of capacity.
2.Disconnect the AC adapter from the notebook PC.
3.Click Start , enter power in the Search field, and then selectPower Options from the list.
4.Select Create a power plan from the left sidebar.
5.Click in the Plan name field and type Calibrator . Then, press Enter .
6.Select Never for all topics in the On battery column.
7.Click Create to accept the values and force the battery to consistently discharge.
8.Allow the battery to discharge completely until the notebook PC shuts down.
9.Connect the AC adapter and restart the notebook PC.
10.After calibration, return to the Power Options dialog box (Step 3) and select your default power plan setting.