Batteries are physical items outside the digital domain of a computer on paper, it will eventually dies that's true but still there are ways to prolong its life:

1. Recharge and discharge it fully, from 0% to 100% is ideal; by that I meant if you do charge it, let it do so to full and when you are using it, let it run down to empty.

2. A powered laptop should be running either the wall power or battery power, not at the same time. Most laptop around can run WITHOUT battery but there is a caveat, accept it or just ignore this: CMOS is not using EEPROM/NVRAM to hold bootup data so those bits of information is lost without any electricity coming in, this is less likely as newer and newer models come along, but this strategy works fine with my 5-year old Acer notebook, only problem so far is having the clock lagging behind true Eastern time by 2 hours.

3. Related to #2, a bad battery that won't hold a charge (physically not really true) can be used to hold CMOS data.instead of going to recycler.

If your laptop has a coin cell backup battery is ideal.