Using a laptop without the battery

[Grandmaw]

The battery has been playing up on my laptop for sometime and I have realised that I can use it without the battery but plugged in. I don,t need to move the laptop around so this is ok for me. Does anyone else do this and will it cause any harm?

When I have finished , I usually just shut the lid down and let the laptop 'go to sleep'. Is it ok to unplug then or should I keep it plugged in all the time if I have not shut it down completely?

The only problem is if you pull the power lead out by accident when you're in the middle of something.

If you close the lid and let it 'sleep' then whether pulling the power will be a problem depends on what you were doing. For example, if you had documents open, they might be locked or corrupted, and perhaps become unusable. You can tell it to 'hibernate' if you wish - that way it's going to be very low on power usage and not ready to restart in 10 seconds but 45-60 perhaps.

Far better (unless it is really slow to boot) to 'shut down' the machine completely when you will be unplugging it for hours/ days at a time.

I use quite a few older laptops in permanent locations (with plugged in keyboards and mice, as that overcomes any keyboard layout differences for me) and some are on for weeks at a time, but then again they're static - not put away so the work surface can be used for something else, IYSWIM.

Further - if some parts of the disk are corrupted, you could cause a more major problem when the Registry cannot be accessed - in effect all settings, applications and so on will perhaps be lost.

Not a good idea to unplug without telling the laptop to close down completely.