When is it a good time to start recharging your DS?

i always charge it after bout 5-10 min after light goes red cuz i dont want to lose data.... unless im going on a long trip, i chrage b4 we leave so it doesn't run out in car/plane/train ect.apu0404

Did you guys not read what I just said? Your cutting your own time short? and why 5-10 minutes? The red light lasts atleast a couple of hours..FireKicks

wow ur answering your own question....y create a topic if ur gonna bash on ppl answer UR question.....

Did you guys not read what I just said? Your cutting your own time short? and why 5-10 minutes? The red light lasts atleast a couple of hours..FireKicks

Dude that's like saying you'll save money by filling up on gas only when your tank is completely empty...

[QUOTE="FireKicks"]Did you guys not read what I just said? Your cutting your own time short? and why 5-10 minutes? The red light lasts atleast a couple of hours..Cruxis27

Dude that's like saying you'll save money by filling up on gas only when your tank is completely empty...

No thats different, a gas tanks volume doesn't diminish the more you fill it up. With the DS battery if you wait till its dead youll get more battery life in the long run as opposed to recharging it right when the red light comes on, which can last for 2 hours

Did you guys not read what I just said? Your cutting your own time short? and why 5-10 minutes? The red light lasts atleast a couple of hours..FireKicks

[QUOTE="Cruxis27"]

[QUOTE="FireKicks"]Did you guys not read what I just said? Your cutting your own time short? and why 5-10 minutes? The red light lasts atleast a couple of hours..FireKicks

Dude that's like saying you'll save money by filling up on gas only when your tank is completely empty...

No thats different, a gas tanks volume doesn't diminish the more you fill it up. With the DS battery if you wait till its dead youll get more battery life in the long run as opposed to recharging it right when the red light comes on, which can last for 2 hours

Yeah, let's all leave our DS on when they're in the red light until it dies completely, which in the process lowers life expentency of the hardware due to having it run the battery dry, while in the process getting shut-off abruptly due to lack a power....

I'd rather just replace the battery in the future when it comes to that point of dying, there's a reason Nintendo used a standard cross-head screw for the battery cover, and not the propriety 3-sided tips they use to hold the actual thing together.

Letting a battery run down completely before you recharge it is only necessary with an older type of battery that's usually not used anymore. When it says 500 fullchargings, you can also take that as roughly 1,000 half chargings, or whatever. It totally doesn't make any difference in battery life.

If you want good battery life out of your DS, just don't leave it in a hot car, because that really shortens the life of DS, ipod, etc.batteries. I just can't remember what the name of the kind of battery the DS uses is though.

Nickel-based batteries are the ones that need to be fully discharged. Lithium batteries, which the DS uses http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/systems/dslite/battery_faq.jsp#dispose, do not need to be fully discharged. In fact, if you fully dicharge a lithium battery you will decrease the life of your battery. Here are several articles that discuss this very thing.

http://www.computerworld.com/blogs/node/521

http://spicygadget.com/2006/12/24/guide-getting-the-most-out-of-your-lithium-battery/

Like another post earlier the 500 charges are full charges which means if you do partial charges you will get more. I would personally recommend that you start charging when you get the red light so you don't accidently drain your battery and damage it.

lets say you're in the car and you have 45 minutes to your destination and POOF, the light turns red. You have nothing else to do in the car, so you wanna play your ds for 45 minutes. My solution would be to save whatever your doing, restart to the ds menu (or M3 menu, whatever) and turn the light to its lowest setting. you'll get a good extra 30-45 minutes doing that. Oh and turn the sound off.