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
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.
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.
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.
Had a similar incident with my son’s hand-me-down laptop. It just sits on a desk with a monitor and what-not plugged into it. It’s now a wide flat desktop.
Retroarch box for your TV?
What is the motherboard?
I would pull out its guts and then come up with a solid cooling solution for the CPU. Be extremely careful of the battery and make sure you dispose of it properly.
Yeah, that’s another thing I was gonna ask about… How does one properly dispose of a battery?
What your situation for data backup? You mentioned a homelab and a NAS, are you running regular backups to an off-box store? You could mate it with a few TB of inexpensive USB disk, maybe some software RAID, and use it for off-box backups. Doesn’t have to be fast, just reliable.
Specs like that, you have some options. Virtual assistant, IPCam NVR like MotionEye or Frigate, media server for your car (takes DC voltage, right?), weather base station, ADS-B feeder, smart mirrors.
Or (if you’re in the US) you could repair it and then, if you donate it to a suitable charity, you could take the the cost of the repair as a deduction on your taxes. Probably doesn’t help you that much, but it could maybe really help someone else who needs it.
Or, just wipe it and send it to e-waste.