Friend of mine hit me up with a question that I found interesting. A laptop that is used more like a desktop computer. Its always plugged in to an outlet and that outlet is through the battery backup side of his UPS. His laptop will run direct from power supply without laptop lithium battery installed.
He was wondering if this was ok to do for long term use without lithium battery installed?
My initial concern when he was talking about this before finding out its powered through a battery backup was that it would drop like a stone if there was a dip in power, but since its powered off-of/thru a healthy UPS I couldn't think of any reason why this would be a problem although it relies heavily on the power supply to carry it along in operation and never gets a cycle of charge/discharge if a battery was present.
One concern he had was that if the battery was always installed that on top of it prematurely killing the lithium battery, he also is fearful of the lithium battery explosions and fires of some of the batteries of years ago. His laptop is an older laptop a Compaq V5000 with Sempron 3300+ Mobile CPU running Windows XP SP3 on 512MB RAM. The battery to the laptop was changed once about 6 years ago and on the rare occasion that he needs the laptop to not be used as a desktop he will charge the battery and it will keep the laptop running for about an hour or so. I told him that while the battery removed does remove the lithium fire hazard, it also means that his battery not charged for long periods of time of non-use could also lead to its degradation in health for the times when he wants to take it out as a laptop on battery power. And that maybe on a quarterly basis he should give the battery a full drain using it off of battery and then a full charge then remove the battery from laptop and this way it still goes through a charge/discharge cycle every 3 months to not go stale.
