“Repurposing old laptops is a one-time delay strategy, not a permanent infrastructure model. Take a 4-year-old laptop, for example. This device will have a battery operating at 50% capacity… or worse. Even if it gets updated with a fast, low-resource system designed to run smoothly on older or weaker computers, such as a lightweight Linux OS, that battery will swell, fail, or die completely within 12-24 months.”
jesus, are y’all really dealing with laptops where the battery will swell fail or die after 4 years + 24 months of use? that sounds insane, I have an 8+ year old Dell Inspiron that I hammer every day and whose battery can still hold a charge
I actually did have a laptop battery fail recently – it swelled and the only reason i realized was the charging light switched from steady to blinking rapidly – something it usually does when the battery voltage is critically low.
Old laptops don’t always come with good battery charging software. Ideally you could set the battery to UPS mode and have it sit to 50%.
Funny enough there is a little Bluetooth dongle that can add this capability to usb-c laptops, but the development is now vibe coded and the developer has gone full AI and the quality of the software and customer support has taken a nosedive.
“Repurposing old laptops is a one-time delay strategy, not a permanent infrastructure model. Take a 4-year-old laptop, for example. This device will have a battery operating at 50% capacity… or worse. Even if it gets updated with a fast, low-resource system designed to run smoothly on older or weaker computers, such as a lightweight Linux OS, that battery will swell, fail, or die completely within 12-24 months.”
jesus, are y’all really dealing with laptops where the battery will swell fail or die after 4 years + 24 months of use? that sounds insane, I have an 8+ year old Dell Inspiron that I hammer every day and whose battery can still hold a charge
I actually did have a laptop battery fail recently – it swelled and the only reason i realized was the charging light switched from steady to blinking rapidly – something it usually does when the battery voltage is critically low.
Old laptops don’t always come with good battery charging software. Ideally you could set the battery to UPS mode and have it sit to 50%.
Funny enough there is a little Bluetooth dongle that can add this capability to usb-c laptops, but the development is now vibe coded and the developer has gone full AI and the quality of the software and customer support has taken a nosedive.
…yeah I have yet to own a battery that lived past 3 years lol tbf I only ever had one swell, but yeah they do not last with me
Damn, guess I’ve reached the ‘back in my day!’ Phase of life, but I’ve definitely had devices last past 3 years