| ▲ | aenis an hour ago |
| How do you power them? Via the battery? I was thinking about turning my old mbp into a build machine, but i am a bit concerned with running it via the battery 24/7 |
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| ▲ | deng an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| I usually disconnect the battery and just power them via USB-C. The battery on these old broken laptops is usually toast anyway... |
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| ▲ | serf 29 minutes ago | parent [-] | | you're lucky you're running into models that don't panic in some way without a battery. for example some alienware and XPS models rely on the battery for amperage capacitance when their big onboard GPUs get busy; allows them to run cooler/less-wattage/smaller wall-warts but it also makes for a platform that'll crash when it hits a high GPU usage without a decent way to make up the amps. 'spose you could use a bigger power supply if you get bios/uefi to play nice. hard proposition sometimes with Dell products. | | |
| ▲ | deng 23 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Well, of course I'm not getting old gaming/pro laptops with dedicated gpus, they would consume far too much power, require extensive cooling, and these are way too expensive anyway, even when broken. I usually get old, boring office laptops (lenovo/dell) from bulk resellers, with integrated graphics who are sufficiently used/broken so they are dirt cheap. As long as they still turn on, the mainboard is usually fine (I've yet to get a broken one). |
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| ▲ | DaSHacka an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Most old PC laptops have external batteries you can detach by pulling out on a springloaded tab. Even MacBooks are possible to run without the battery, but it requires some NVRAM trickery IIRC. |
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| ▲ | grvbck 18 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Some older MacBook and MacBook Pro models reduce processor speed and GPU performance roughly by half when running without a battery, to avoid shutting down if the computer needs more power than the AC adapter can provide. Apple documented the behavior in a support note. I’m not sure if the Apple Silicon models do the throttling as well. I guess the situation doesn't come up as often since the batteries are no longer user-removable. | | |
| ▲ | hoppyhoppy2 12 minutes ago | parent [-] | | At least on older Macbook there's a way to override BD PROCHOT MSR setting to undo the slowdown. |
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| ▲ | eternauta3k an hour ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Maybe put it on a timer, or have the laptop control its own outlet. |
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