Comment on Ideas for how to repurpose a half broken laptop
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 10 months agoIf 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.
appel@whiskers.bim.boats 10 months ago
I’ve run laptops before without batteries a few times and never had issues, is there a reason for the slowdown?
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
That’s not something that should ever happen on most devices. If your battery is discharging under load you likely have a faulty device.
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 10 months ago
There’s nothing wrong with the device, Lenovo has confirmed this, and both motherboards my laptop has had have the same “problem”. This isn’t my only machine like this either, 16" Intel MacBook Pros are also known to discharge under full load, but that’s because they’re limited to 100 watt USB C.
There’s a reason why those devices run at minimum clock speeds when their battery is sub 5%.
appel@whiskers.bim.boats 10 months ago
Interesting, never had that happen to me, but then perhaps you are using a laptop with a dgpu? I have not been. My laptop generally consumes 4w at idle and up to 15w under load, so I don’t see this ever outpacing the 60w charger. The CPUs with the highest tdp are only around 100w anyway right? And in that case the laptop comes with a higher wattage charger. But you’re right I guess it could happen depending on the hardware, never personally seen it however.
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It even happens with power efficient devices. All Macbooks will run at their lowest clock speed with a dead/low battery (even my M1), My Thinkpad T14 with an ULV CPU and it’s odd. It tries to limit total system power to around 25 watts, even though I have a 100 watt power supply connected. My theory is that since 30 watts is the lowest power supply it will run off of it’s trying to keep that 5 watt buffer. Unfortunately that means my CPU runs at 800mhz doing anything but idling. Laptops with dGPUs often just wont work at all, or are so far limited they’re unusable.
Some older laptops like my Thinkpad X220 will run at 800mhz on a 65 watt charger, but on a 90 watt charger it will run at full speed. But unfortunately in the days of USB C that makes things a lot more difficult.