Ideas for how to repurpose a half broken laptop
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.
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.
It does work without the battery and the model is: dell G3 3579, I just didn't think the model was that important to mention.
95% of the time the exact model isn't super important, nowhere near as important as specifications, but when it comes to the physical build like whether it can run without the battery, it can be useful to know.
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.
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.
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.
It will be a really bad UPS at best
Happened to my ladyfriend with a macbook pro. Cracked the shell of the laptop. No fire, but it sure did swell.
Because it is a safety issue and the battery isn't designed for that anyway. A UPS is designed to stay charged for a long period of time and laptop is not.
Make sure you have a cooling solution...
you can keep the fan and heatsink on the board
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.
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%.
That's a terrible design then. I would never want a device that would do that
Well I hope you don't like ThinkPads...
My Lenovo P1 with an i7 and a Nvidia 4900 and a 230W adapter is wondering what you're talking about.
P1 gen 4 with the i9 and rtx 3080. Pay close attention to the power levels under heavy load. It will drop massively under long term heavy loads to try to prevent the battery from discharging. My machine only takes in a little over 170 watts from the power supply, but with a laptop cooling pad it can easily sustain over that 170 watt mark. It doesn't happen instantly, it starts when the laptop is fully heat soaked (takes 30+ minutes with the cooling pad). You won't notice it until about an hour or two in, but once it starts it will start accelerating as the battery heats up. Shorter loads that the laptop is more designed for it handles it just fine. It's only when you push it for too long and too hard.
Also whats the power consumption of the mobile 4090 like sitting on but idle? Random programs trigger my 3080 for no reason and that GPU draws about 20 watts minimum. I want to upgrade, but I'd lose vram if I got anything less than the 4090 and I don't know if I want all of that excess power draw when the system can barely benefit from it, and it makes using it as a laptop awful.
What you are saying in the first paragraph seems more about cooling capacity rather than the computer taking more power than the power supply can handle. I might have misunderstood, but that's what I don't see happening with the charging brick. It does happen with the usb-c hub that's integrated on the monitor. It barely even keeps the battery with normal work, while my previous x13 (integrated graphics) had no issues regardless of task.
I don't know the power in idle, I can't install anything, not sure if I can check. If you know a way let me know and I'll try.
The power draw is being limited, but not because the CPU or GPU are running too hot (they'll be in the mid 80s or even 70s). It's when the power delivery parts (inside the laptop) get too hot to keep up and it can't keep up. You can override those with programs like throttlestop, but the battery will drop MUCH quicker. When it's hot the PL1 and PL2 drop to about 25 watts which is basically unusable on 11th gen i9, but it easily has the head room for 45-55 watts. GPU is largely unaffected which is weird. I've seen it get limited to around 60 watts, but the 3080 mobile below 80 watts is also awful.
For monitoring power usage I use hwinfo 64 in windows, I'm not sure if the portable version would work.
Ok, I've never heard about that. I might run some form of stress test just to see better.
Portable software worked in the past, but I don't want IT calling me... A third time.
I don't but that's beside the point
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.
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.