Are Librem laptop able to power on without a battery present

I did search. I’m just curious, if the laptop powers on when a battery is completely absent? Or if the absence of the battery means the circuit is not complete, and the laptop will not power on?

How does anything electrical power on without the power present? Do you mean charging cord in battery out?

Obviously. (sorry I thought it was obvious at least.)

Yes power cord in, battery out, will it power up?

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Yes, they work without battery but the DC charger connected.

Cheers
nicole

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Glad to hear it! [One of my pet peeves is a device that I NEVER intend to carry with me, that won’t work without a battery in it. Then they scold you about constantly having it plugged in, claiming that that shortens the battery life. (Well, dumbsh*ts, if you didn’t force me to put the battery in, I wouldn’t be killing it!)]

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Oh wow! I’ve never had a machine that did that before!

I know leaving a laptop plugged into the charger perpetually degrades a battery. Now I’m religiously unplugging my old hand-me-down Toshiba Satellite whenever it gets to 100%, then using it till it’s 8%.

My old acer from 2008 (acting as smart video player for kids now) still working without battery so it’s not that exceptional.

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I would advise against charging and discharging a battery over and over again just for the sake of not hanging it from. The degrade has three causes:

  1. every charge cycle degrades capacity - every cycle
  2. almost all rechargeable batteries do not like to be deep discharged
  3. charging the last 5-10% is critical, these need to be charged slowly and preferably never
    A good LiPoly / LiIon charger should stop charging a battery before it reaches its full capacity - at about 90% to 95%, then the battery will last a lot longer. It should also not try to charge the battery if it has not fallen under a certain level, like at least 80% or lower. This avoids recharge cycles. This way a LiPoly battery with decent cells can last many years.

Sadly most charging logics do not do this and charge them all the time until they do not accept current anymore - which is why for some chargers it is indeed useful to not have them connected to the charger all the time because they will try to shove more and more current into battery (every time a little discharged happened).

Out current Librem laptops stop charging altogether when being left on the charger - so I would recommend letting it sit with the charger connected as long as possible and only to disconnect it when needed and then not to connect it right away, but indeed use the battery - this of course does not apply so well when you just want to carry it from one room to the next :frowning:

For the phone and for future laptops we want to have better control over this, like it was available with the tp_smapi driver on some Thinkpads where you can set thresholds for start charge, stop charge etc.

Cheers
nicole

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Ooh, thanks for that bit of info. Got some old Thinkpads, but never knew we had control over the charging parameters. Something to look into. :slight_smile:

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Yep you can access it via the battery gauge on the taskbar or through Lenovo Vantage.

It works well. Just don’t forget to turn it off if you need to use your laptop while away. Starting at only 80% battery can be less than ideal when you need to work.

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Same for me, but I did adjust my Panasonic Toughbook, where you can choose to only charge up to 80% in the BIOS setup.

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