If you read the owner's manual for your Nintendo DS before playing "Breath of the Wild," you may remember the recommendation to charge the battery every six months, even if you are not using it. As Nintendo's customer service representatives reminded us, like most good technical advice, this advice needs to be repeated. If your last big Switch project was Animal Crossing: If you played Animal Crossing New Horizons back in March, you need to turn the console off for a while.

"Charge your Switch every six months" is not new advice, but the latest advice comes from Nintendo's customer service account on Twitter: to paraphrase a tweet via Google Translate, Nintendo is telling customers to charge their Switch at least once every six months urges them to charge their Switch at least once every six months. Failure to do so could cause the system to become "unchargable."

To review basic chemistry, batteries produce an electrical charge through an electrochemical reaction. While using a battery drains power immediately, a battery on standby is still draining power, albeit much more slowly. If the battery is left unused for too long, it loses the minimum charge needed to start the chemical reaction and the battery must be replaced; replacing the Switch's battery can be a hassle even for tech-savvy gamers.

Speaking from personal experience, Nintendo's warning should be taken seriously. My Switch's battery was completely ruined after just a few weeks of not charging it. Repairing it would be expensive and I would almost certainly lose all my save files. Furthermore, the battery in the Nintendoswitch is very delicate, even by the standards of portable gadgets. The less chance of repair, the better.

If you tend to use your Switch only for big Nintendo games and leave it sleeping in between, your best bet may be to keep it plugged into the dock when not in use. There is some debate as to whether prolonged use will weaken the battery, but in general, modern lithium-ion batteries do not become overcharged like the nickel-cadmium batteries of old, so perhaps leaving the Switch in the dock for an extended period of time will not have an adverse effect. Even in that case, it is better to have a weakened battery than one that is completely dead.

This warning applies to almost every gadget you own, so if you have an old handheld console lying in a box somewhere, it's probably time to dig it out and plug it in for a few hours. No one wants to buy a broken gadget, even if they intend to eventually get rid of it.