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Anybody have good guides on repurposing old 32bit laptops?
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this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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You could run Void on it... and a few other niche distros, but Void is the most mainstream one that still supports x86. Plus, xbps-src holds almost everything else that is not present in the official repos, so, you could just compile from source using the template.
Forget about the battery, it's not worth it. Use it till it dies completely, then remove it and use it on the charger.
Void seems cool.
But battery might be important since a lot of laptops will not start if the batttery is missing or has undervoltage. General advise would therefore be to not discharge the battery to a bare mininum but to keep it always at least 20-30% charged. Especially when Laptop is not used for longer time.
Older models start, no prob there. Newer ones, that don't have detachable batteries, yes, they can be a problem (sometimes, depends on make and model... usually brands like Dell or Lenovo can make a fuss over it). Even in those cases, there are BIOS mods that remove this limitation.
Of course, that general advice is good and should be followed. But some batteries will die even if you follow these advices. There were some laptops back in the day that had a recharge cycle counter inside the charge/discharge controller in the battery. They would just die, out of the blue, after, let's say, 1000 charges. People that were used to having their laptops plugged in all the time, regardless if they needed that or not, spent the recharge cycles a lot faster than people that just plugged in the laptop whenever it was low on battery. This happened because the charging circuit sometimes falsely reports the battery as a little drained (99%), so it will recharge it just a tad. Still, this "just a tad" added 1 recharge cycle to the count. Over the course of a day, this may happen, 10, 15 times, which ammounts to 10, 15 charges accourding to the counter. So, their batteries basically went dead right after their warranty expired. There are ways to reset the counter or completely jump that piece of code, but it's just not worth it. Too much RCE work for very little gain.
It's a shame though... those batteries were still OK. It was just a shitty move from the manufacturers to try and squeze more money from their clients for batteries.
I'll be away from both stable electricity and stable internet so I can't just ditch a battery.
Are you a horse?
Didn't realise I walked into comedy central.
Doesn't really matter, those chargers can take in from about 90V to about 250, 260V. Forget what the sticker says about 110~230, they're designed for unstable voltage operation (not actually designed for that, but they don't wanna make different ones for EU and UK/US voltages coz it costs more, plus people bitch about not being able to use them abroad, so they just make the same ones and ship with different plugs). Trust me, they can handle voltage swings pretty darn good. They're SMPS power supplies, they're designed to output the same voltage in a very wide range of input voltages.
If you really think that a battery will help (it might help... in some cases... depending on how it's built), just leave the battery on even if it's dead. It might work as voltage dumper in some cases, but as I said, it depends on the design.
By "stable" I mean that for the majority of the time I will not have any electricity or internet. My use case explicitly requires battery and offline software.