zlacker

If your laptop firmware doesn't support it, here is one trick if you have a removable battery:

Put a piece of paper over one of the batteries middle contacts. That will make the firmware think the battery is overheating. It will then refuse to charge, but will still happily discharge.

You can do that to keep your battery at 80% while still on AC power. Handy if you operate from AC power 99% of the time, yet don't want your battery to die from being stored at 100% charge and hot for many years.

>>london+(OP)
> Put a piece of paper over one of the batteries middle contacts.

Bad, very bad idea if you don't know what you are doing - depending on where the "smarts" in the BMS are, you may damage your battery or make your BMS think the pack is broken or prevent your BMS from recognizing a charge state mismatch (and in the worst case, a cell going undervoltage or reverse polarity) as you have a good chance that you cut off one of the cell balancer contacts. This trick only works with removable phone batteries.

>>mschus+6C
Would an engineer really make a consumer design where a sliding contact failing open led to a safety incident?

Every laptop since the 90's has the balancing and protection circuitry inside the battery, not inside the laptop.

>>london+Ow1
Indeed, at worst you'll get a "no battery installed" and the laptop might not even try to discharge it.

The comment you're replying to is just paranoic FUD. Which removable laptop battery has external balancing contacts!?!? They're all +/-/data.

>>userbi+z22
I'm a corporate firefighter assistant. If there's one thing people should not be messing around with, it's Li-Ion batteries. These things are dangerous enough even without people messing around with their control and management systems.