Why buying laptops is a bad deal long term (dead battery = unable toboot up)

Against Paul's reservations a few years ago I bought a cheap i5 laptop (Dell Latitude) used on eBay and it's worked OK, except it powers off (sleep) every so often, randomly.

I bought a new battery and it seemingly got even worse.

I spent an hour or two playing around with settings for sleep and so on, see below for a partial list, and for now it's "OK" (not powering off after 10 minutes like before) but I'm not confident it will stay that way.

I read below that if your system registers that the battery is very low, you can get a situation where it refuses to power up, for safety reasons.

Anybody experience this?

Also whether I should just run the laptop without a battery? (After this post I might try that 'solution'). But I think having no battery might register as "low battery"? And Dell has locked the BIOS with a unknown master password so I can't screw around with the BIOS, which is very extensive (pages and pages of settings, the most I've ever seen).

Another reason why a laptop is inferior to a desktop.

RL

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...1-033a34d27d9d
Ludvik,

I think that only MSI can advise you about whether or not that firmware update should be applied [or possibly they have user forums that have convincing arguments one way or another]. Unlike software changes, firmware updates cannot generally be removed afterwards.

As for the missing Full charge capacity & Design capacity entries, I have never seen that before [even on a couple of batteries that were extremely worn out and down to about 10% of their original capacity].

I know that there is a very, very low battery charge threshold that can trigger the battery to report to the system that it is completely unusable [not even capable of being recharged]. Once triggered, that threshold response cannot normally be reset.

The threshold value is something that is set by battery designers, possibly in consultation with computer system designers, and no general information about the level is published.
It can reasonably be assumed that it is well below the Critical battery action % that Windows allows us to set in Power options [this is often no less than 3% or 5% & with the only selectable options being Hibernate or Shutdown] .
The point of the threshold is fire safety - if a battery is left to discharge below, say, 1.5V remaining then the resultant chemical reactions can cause breakdown of the battery material leading to dangerous localised currents & hence overheating if it is then recharged.

Perhaps the missing Full charge capacity & Design capacity entries are a symptom of that state.

There is another type of PowerCFg report that also includes the missing parameters but I imagine that it queries the battery firmware in the same way that the battery report did and will therefore yield the same results -

Use an elevated command prompt for this

PowerCfg -energy -duration 0 -output EnergyReport.html

Given the age of the computer, I would have thought you could claim a replacement from MSI. You should probably check your warranty before contacting them - many warranties exclude the battery so your only chance of getting a free replacement would be by using charm.

https://www.onmsft.com/how-to/adjust...screen-timeout

https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/X...6203849#M19436
https://www.windowscentral.com/how-c...dows-10-laptop