Is my stinginess ruining my laptop?
Didn't realize I posted this on chat instead of tech, so I locked that one and remade this one.
I've had an ASUS U52F notebook for a little over two years now and about four or five months ago, the battery died.
I removed the battery from my laptop and when I put my laptop to charge without the battery, it would start up and work normally. So, I said to myself, screw the battery, and just decided to use it with the charger. I'd take the charger with me when I needed to use the laptop outside of home.
However, in the past few days, I've noticed that apparently my charger has a faulty connection or something and won't receive any power if I move it to certain positions. Since I have no battery, this means an abrupt cut to my laptop's power supply, shutting it off.
The last time this happened, when I started my laptop, it made a somewhat loud noise from the fan and I could feel an unusual strong breeze coming from the ventilation shafts along the side of my laptop. The screen also stayed pitch black even though the power buttons on my keyboard were lit up.
This is the second time this happens and I'm afraid my unwillingness to spend any money is going to be counterproductive in the long run if I keep this up. Are there any long-term dangers to what I'm doing? Should I just give up and shell out the hundred bucks it takes to buy the new battery?
2 Comments • Newest first
There's really no downside electrically to using the laptop without the battery like you've been doing, but the problem is the physical wear and possible damage to the power connectors and the charger wires.
The intermittent connection you've described could be caused by damage to the wires (possibly from pulling the cable out by the wire instead of grasping the connector), or damage to the connector on the laptop from being plugged and unplugged all the time. (This kind of damage can also happen a lot in normal laptop use, even with the battery since you have to plug and unplug the charger a lot then too.)
It's possible it might damage the hard drive if power is cut off suddenly (although that's not very likely), but what's more likely is that it could damage the Windows installation and files on the hard drive. When power is suddenly cut off while the computer is on and working, it's indeterminate what may happen to the files that are open, and it often results in having to reformat and reinstall Windows, which would lose all your personal files.
Getting a new battery would help ease that problem, but you should also investigate what's causing the intermittent connections because just having a new battery won't fix that.
That was just a fluctuation because the power suddenly turned off, obviously it will happen in the future too.
I recommend getting a battery ASAP.