Tell HN: Laptop Runs Without Battery

2 points by meristohm ↗ HN
In case this helps extend battery life and reduce waste, I'm sharing this information:

My 2012 laptop battery holds about an hour's worth of charge, I rarely move the laptop, and it is plugged into a (presumably lead-acid) uninterruptible power supply, so I discharged the battery to about half, shut it down, removed the battery, and booted back up- that it works fine was no surprise, but it felt like something to share.

As I was typing this, the power went out. The UPS isn't connected to the laptop in a "smart" way and so it's up to me to shut down. No problem. The wifi will continue awhile and then it too will turn off.

Questions: -does removing the battery like this, for a battery that doesn't regulate itself like the one in my 2022 Dell work laptop does (I set that to stay between 50 & 80%), help extend battery life?

-what software do you recommend for gnu/linux to take input from the UPS to tell the laptop to shutdown?

-what are the potential harms of a power outage on a laptop or desktop without a battery of any sort? Possibly some data loss (I use EXT4 and I understand "journaling" is helpful in cases like this?), possibly some hardware & tear?

Thanks for your consideration.

2 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] thread
It depends on a lot of factors.

Had a Workstation with a B450 mobo that was running when the Texas grid went nuts. Figured the battery would act as a filter and all would be fine. Nooooooope. Turns out the voltage regulator was ahead of the battery, and let the magic smoke out.

Lesson learned: Never assume the thing you're using works the way you think it does. Check the datasheets/schematics.

Ended up losing two 1TB NVMe SSD's to boot. Though I was able to recover the data off of them, never could write a bit to them again.