Charging your phone via laptop

[jackroo]

I had a question regarding charging my phone via laptop.
I use my phone all day until it generally hits around 35% or so. Luckily at work I am able to sit and charge my phone at the kiosk I work at. The only thing I find to use is a Samsung USB. We use a flip phone as our regular work phone so I am able to use the USB. Anyway I notice that it charges ridiculously slow when hooked up to our laptop!! It will barely creep up by the time I leave at 9 even if I don't use it. Granted I do have an ancient refurbished laptop (Dell Latitude D630). Does it make a difference how much power the laptop has? Am I doing something wrong? When I use my laptop at home it charges just fine.
Thanks for any tips!

 

[tilk23]

I think some older laptops had an option in bios to switch to hi power usb which will still be less than a 1 Amp that the wall charger has but it may speed things up a bit.

 

[jackroo]

Well this model is from 2006 according to Google. It's painfully slow. It's at 37%. I plugged it in about an hour ago at 33%. Obviously nothing to do with the phone and everything to do with this laptop I'm not supposed to mess with any settings due to company policy...

 

[breezex]

It might also be the USB cable that you are using. Try a different cable and see if that helps.

 

[jackroo]

Wish I had a different USB. I just have one

 

[EpicMindWarp]

To be honest, all laptops take absolutely ages to charge phones from mainly due to USB power restrictions to prevent frying up your connected gadgets and preventing too much power passing through the motherboard and frying that up.

I run a brand new i7 laptop and even if my phones hooked up for an hour to the laptop via USB, it doesn't come close to the charging rates I get from plugging in directly to the mains charger.

 

[CMNDR]

As mentioned before, USB as a standard is current limited to 500mA. This is to prevent any faulty gadgets that you plug in from hurting you or your PC. The charger that came with the phone is a 1000mA charger, and still takes about 2.8 hours to charge. I'd guess that the phone, depending on network status and usage will draw about 300mA. The battery is 2100mA/hr. So if the phone is off when you charge it from empty, with a computer it should be all done in about 4.2 hours.

See here for additional info on Li-ion batteries and charging.