Your iPod's battery is a Li polymer that's rated for five hundred or more charging cycles. (A charging cycle is a full discharge that is, when you run the battery the whole way down until it has no charge left and follow it with a full charge.) If you reload your iPod's battery all other day, 500 charges should last you the better part of three years (though a few claim you will get only about eighteen months). If you recharge your iPod's battery less frequently, there's a good chance the battery will outlive the hard drive. Here's how to get the longest life conceivable.

Don't let the battery entirely die

To get the most lifespan out of your battery, do not let it discharge fully that is, don't run it until it is dead. However little you use your iPod, reload it fully at least once every 3 weeks to prevent the battery from exiting flat. If you go on holiday for a month, you should bring your iPod with you and reload it during that time. (But you were going to take your iPod with you on vacation anyhow, weren't you?)

Cut back demands on the battery

• Play your music by album or by playlist, rather than skipping from one track to another. Remember that your iPod may cache an album or playlist to minimize the time the hard disk is spinning. But when you call for your iPod to produce a different track it hasn't cached, it has to spin up the hard disk and access the song.
  
  
• Use AAC or MP3 files instead of WAV or AIFF (Mac users only) files. Because WAVs and AIFFs are uncompressed and, hence, much bigger than compressed files, they keep your iPod from using its cache effectively, so the hard disk has to process much harder.
  
  
• Minimize your use of the backlight or turn it off altogether. To control the backlight, go to Settings > Backlight Timer. Here, you are able to assign the amount of time you want the backlight to stay on (2, 5, 10, or 20 seconds), set it to Always On (not suggested, evidently, for saving your battery), or for maximal conservation, just turn it off.

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