Laptop batteries life spans; a damaged USB flash drive

Q: When I lost power last weekend, my six-year-old laptop batteries shut down abruptly, even though its battery supposedly had a full charge good for three hours. The lithium-ion batteries in most laptops lose a little capacity after each charge/discharge cycle. Hewlett-Packard estimates that its models will drop to 80 percent of their original capacity "after 300 cycles or about one year of use." Dell advises that most people will see "noticeable" declines in battery life after 18 to 24 months. And Apple says its batteries will fall to 80 percent capacity after 300 cycles, while the inaccessible units in its newest laptops will take 1,000 cycles to reach that point. I've seen major reductions in run time with batteries just a couple of years old.