Due to unfortunate circumstances (me dropping the laptop) I have now ended up with a half broken laptop that has a broken screen and a dying battery. I could repair it, however, I don’t wanna bother as I’m very likely gonna be getting a new one soon.
The laptop itself still works fine, however the broken screen and dying battery make it pretty much useless as a laptop and I already have a home lab NAS thing, so I’m kinda out of ideas on what to do with it. Any ideas?
Here are the specs:
CPU: i5-8300h
GPU: intel HD830/GTX1050ti
RAM: 16GB
Storage: 128GB SSD
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Remove the battery, take the motherboard out of the case. Plug the motherboard in, and voila you have a larger and more powerful raspberry pi. You could use it as a second node for control, management, observation purposes, etc.
If you remove the battery it will either A not work or B run extremely slowly. Always have a functional battery in your laptops.
Ideally find a way to limit the charge of the battery. But if you can’t nuking your battery is better than running at 800mhz or whatever your lowest clock speed is.
I’ve run laptops before without batteries a few times and never had issues, is there a reason for the slowdown?
Power consumption. Especially with turbo boost power consumption can easily spike well above what the power brick can deliver, so the battery is used like a capacitor. Or shit even without the spikes chargers can’t keep up. My laptop will actually discharge under full load with the full 240 watt charger.
It’s not normally an issue on REALLY low end devices (sub core i, like pentiums or atoms), but anything high end will reduce it’s power consumption without a batter installed.
That’s not something that should ever happen on most devices. If your battery is discharging under load you likely have a faulty device.
Great suggestion, but I’m not entirely sure it’s 100% possible on all models? Some models are built so that it won’t turn on without a battery installed (much like phones) and that the power has to pass through the battery before it reaches the motherboard.
I believe that scenario would take much more knowledge of electricity plus some soldering skills to bypass the battery. They gave specs, but not make and model. I don’t trust companies like HP to not take the route that requires you to send it in to them for servicing.
Not really necessary to take the mb out of the case, but removing the battery is a good idea. Tuck the laptop somewhere out-of-the-way and install your preferred Linux (like Debian stable). Set up some services on it, and enjoy having a nice, decently low-energy server.
Why remove the battery when it is a perfectly working built in UPS?
Because over time the battery degrades, swells, and becomes a fire risk.
Keeping it only 80% charged can help mitigate it but not fully.
That is largely a myth and in my experience never happens with higher quality laptop batteries. But yes limiting charge doesn’t hurt if it is only used as a UPS anyways.
What part is the myth?
Which batteries are “high quality”?
Cause it happens… Pretty regularly if you’re not limiting charging. The older the battery the more likely.
This isn’t something you should fuck around with either: if it pops it’ll burn too hot to extinguish and could take out your house.
Happened to my ladyfriend with a macbook pro. Cracked the shell of the laptop. No fire, but it sure did swell.
Not a myth. Better batteries might have better safety measures, but none is inmune. It might not have happened to you but I’ve seen it happen in several high end/expensive brands already.
