Congratulate me on being a wft again



  • I have an old laptop which I like and which I need for a few purposes. It had a broken battery and I replaced it.

    Two months pass, and then I put it to sleep for too long, like, a week, with no power supply attached. The battery now has discharged so deeply that it won't charge anymore.

    Now you can congratulate me on a new expense, yay!



  • Cake thread is :arrows:



  • Well, a battery should not break down just because you did that. They usually don't let you discharge it enough to break it.

    I'm guessing it was a cheap battery, or it can still be charged but your laptop can't do it. And there's most likely an ACPI fail involved (that piece of shit should be given the "worst standard ever" prize).

    Batteries are TRWTF. Or particularly, the fact that they're still completely unstandardized and no one seems to care.


  • Banned

    Shouldn't the laptop do an emergency power cutoff when the battery gets that low?



  • @anonymous234 said:

    I'm guessing it was a cheap battery, or it can still be charged but your laptop can't do it.

    It's a replacement, non-brand battery. Brand batteries were discontinued a while ago.



  • It does. But it will still continue to discharge.



  • @wft said:

    Brand batteries were discontinued a while ago.

    Of course they were. If there's any brand that sells laptops for a decent price and supports them for more than a year, I'd love to know it.



  • @anonymous234 said:

    Of course they were. If there's any brand that sells laptops for a decent price and supports them for more than a year, I'd love to know it.

    Apple has decent prices, depending on what side of the counter you are on 😛
    Also, Lenovo Thinkpad series: you can still order parts and assemble a whole new X230, for example.



  • I've found the dell and hp business lines (inspiron and probook/elitebook, respectively) to have consistency for several years on docking station and battery part numbers, with ongoing support for at least 3y after a major parts revision. Of course, you pay business grade prices for it.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election Banned

    @wft said:

    Apple has decent prices

    :rofl:



  • @wft said:

    depending on what side of the counter you are on

    I quote this specifically for you.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election Banned

    I'm fairly certain that even their Nerds or whatever they call them aren't that stupid to think the prices are decent, and I'm guessing Apple's too greedy to give them commissions.



  • @wft said:

    Also, Lenovo Thinkpad series

    Yeah but Lenovo sneaked malware on their laptops twice... so no thanks.

    (and they own Motorola now... sigh)



  • @anonymous234 said:

    Yeah but Lenovo sneaked malware on their laptops twice... so no thanks.

    Friends don't let friends use preinstalled systems.



  • Well, one of those malware programsWindows experience enhancements by Lenovo™ was stored in the computer firmware and would install itself on a clean Windows install... so yeah.



  • @anonymous234 said:

    tored in the computer firmware and would install itself on a clean Windows install...

    well :rolleyes: here's the problem:

    @anonymous234 said:

    Windows



  • @wft said:

    Lenovo

    Now with free, non-removable BIOS rootkit!

    No thanks.



  • Oh, you're the antithesis of Blakey now, I see.

    Still a dirty move that would lose my trust. It's not like Linux and BSD don't get viruses. What's stopping them from adding a BIOS rootkit that runs on Linux? Hint: Nothing


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Gaska said:

    Shouldn't the laptop do an emergency power cutoff when the battery gets that low?

    @Rhywden said:

    It does. But it will still continue to discharge.

    :wtf: No.

    If the computer shuts off, the battery may still drain a bit to keep the LED running. But even then it will hit a minimum charge, and will cut itself off from discharging anymore.

    Unless it's a defective piece of China shit, in which case they probably forgot that circuit, and you got what you paid for.

    Just be glad you found out that the charge detectors aren't working while DISCHARGING. There's a non-zero chance that battery wouldn't detect when it was fully charged. Then rather than a funny sidebar post, you have a house fire.



  • @Lorne_Kates said:

    If the computer shuts off, the battery may still drain a bit to keep the LED running. But even then it will hit a minimum charge, and will cut itself off from discharging anymore.

    The electrochemical processes don't stop simply because you will it to be so. It's called self-discharge.



  • @anonymous234 said:

    Yeah but Lenovo sneaked malware on their laptops

    So did Apple. They call it OSX 🚜


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Rhywden said:

    The electrochemical processes don't stop simply because you will it to be so. It's called self-discharge.

    If your brand new batter self-discharges itself to death in less than a week, then all my points still stand.



  • To be fair, Windows was definitely at fault here too, since the malware was installed using a documented Windows feature designed for injecting executables into the system at boot time from the firmware (something that hopefully Linux would never implement).

    There's no way to fully defend yourself from hardware attacks on any OS, but a Linux system with an encrypted filesystem would definitely be harder to compromise than an OS that actively asks you if you want it to run something.



  • If you're discharging it to the point where the computer will power down and then let it lie around for a week, that's not really such a short time.

    Also, :moving_goal_post: a bit, aren't we?


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Rhywden said:

    If you're discharging it to the point where the computer will power down and then let it lie around for a week, that's not really such a short time.

    Also, :moving_goal_post: a bit, aren't we?

    Except as it was pointed out, the computer will power down long before the battery reaches such a critically low level. Or the battery will cut itself off to prevent the computer from drawing more power than that.

    There's no way to slice it without the battery being a defective firehazard piece of night-shift shit from China.



  • @Lorne_Kates said:

    Except as it was pointed out, the computer will power down long before the battery reaches such a critically low level. Or the battery will cut itself off to prevent the computer from drawing more power than that.

    Yes. The computer will power down and the battery will cut itself off.

    Inside the battery, the self-discharge is still happening. And with such a low percentage of charge still available, one week may very well be enough to kill it.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Rhywden said:

    Inside the battery, the self-discharge is still happening. And with such a low percentage of charge still available, one week may very well be enough to kill it.

    I call 🐄🐑 on that. If that were the case, brand new batteries would be dying all over the place when people went away on vacation.

    I've run down batteries before, and have never once had a battery die to death.



  • If you leave them enough charge, the self-discharge won't kill them.

    There's a reason why experts give the advice to store your batteries in a zip-lock bag and put it into the freezer when you're not using them for a bit.

    And, of course, just because you didn't have something like that happen to you it surely means that the phenomenon does not exist. :rolleyes:


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Rhywden said:

    If you leave them enough charge, the self-discharge won't kill them.

    There's a reason why experts give the advice to store your batteries in a zip-lock bag and put it into the freezer when you're not using them for a bit.

    Many experts are idiots, too.

    Here's some edu-mo-cation: http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/elevating_self_discharge

    @Rhywden said:

    And, of course, just because you didn't have something like that happen to you it surely means that the phenomenon does not exist. :rolleyes:

    If batteries discharged to the point of death is as easy as you're making out to be, I'd have killed a battery or two in my time.

    So either physics is wrong, or you have a piece of shit battery.



  • You know, I always wondered where people like you got their thinking skill from.

    Me: Here's some information from Wikipedia about this effect
    You: You're wrong! Here's some link which essentially has the same content as the Wikipedia article!

    By the way, it's not physics, it's (electro)chemistry. And your sentiment as to "experts being idiots" only shows that you have read neither the Wikipedia link nor the link you yourself posted or you'd have stumbled upon this tidbit:

    The self-discharge of all battery chemistries increases at higher temperature and the rate typically doubles with every 10°C (18°F).

    That's something every chemist knows, by the way - reaction rates roughly double every 10 K.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Rhywden said:

    it's not physics

    Everything is physics.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Lorne_Kates said:

    I've run down batteries before, and have never once had a battery die to death.

    I've got a Dell laptop in a filing cabinet next to my office that was used as a primary system by a coworker for 3-4 years. She retired just about a year ago, and it's been unused ever since. Last week I fired it up and--get this--it had enough juice to turn on, although it immediately died. Get this *2: when I plugged it in, it started charging.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Rhywden said:

    You're wrong! Here's some link which essentially has the same content as the Wikipedia article!

    Hey, that article says 1-2%/month loss, plus more for a protection circuit. That's a far cry from a week. Odds are we can ignore self-discharge as the reason the battery died.

    I've seen lots of laptops get left asleep and power off, and never seen one die from it after only a week, especially not with a new battery.

    Occam's razor says this was a defective or poorly-made battery.



  • @Lorne_Kates said:

    @Rhywden said:
    it's not physics

    Everything is physics.

    [url=https://xkcd.com/435/]Oh, hey, I didn't see you guys all the way over there.[/url]


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @DCRoss said:

    @Lorne_Kates said:
    @Rhywden said:
    it's not physics

    Everything is physics.

    [url=https://xkcd.com/435/]Oh, hey, I didn't see you guys all the way over there.[/url]

    I was going to find Rosie O'Donnell in a lab coat, but these two concurrent results from GIS are better:

    http://i.imgur.com/GjlNDYH.png



  • @FrostCat said:

    defective or poorly-made battery

    Batteries, like children in school or sketchy financial instruments get graded A, B, C, etc. Cheap third party OEMs are where you offload your low grade shit to try to recover some of the material costs when the SD rates are too high so that your name brand customers aren't willing to take 'em...



  • Does not change the fact that self-discharge exists.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election Banned

    @Rhywden said:

    Does not change the fact that self-discharge exists.

    Does not change the fact that self-discharge alone cannot account for a battery dying to death after one week.



  • Ah, so it cannot and for that we have ... only your word. Pardon me if that's not exactly convincing.

    If the cells were old it might very well be sufficient.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election Banned

    1-2%/month is a hell of a lot slower than 1-2%/week. Simple math.



  • Those are numbers for new cells.



  • @rc4 said:

    What's stopping them from adding a BIOS rootkit that runs on Linux? Hint: Nothing

    Wide variety of filesystems making it quite complicated to have one that successfully installs. Encrypted root filesystem is also a good way to prevent that.

    I'm not saying it's impossible but quite a bit harder when you can encrypt the disk during install and use some fucked up filesystem the rootkit wouldn't understand. There's an unencrypted boot process but it's probably way out-of-reach for the hack jobs that made the rootkit in the first place.

    Windows is such an easy platform to target when the OS is usually pre-installed and when reinstalled, it's usually done without encryption first and there's only one filesystem that matters (NTFS) so the rootkit has more than enough time to infect it on reboot - even during install - and doesn't need to be very complicated.

    Can you even enable BitLocker during any type of Windows install?



  • @Rhywden said:

    Those are numbers for new cells.

    That was what we were talking about, yes.



  • Only that you don't know if he actually got new ones.



  • @Fox said:

    1-2%/month is a hell of a lot slower than 1-2%/week. Simple math.

    The 1-2%/month is likely for normal room temperature (20°C).
    If the self-discharge rate doubles with every 10°C then at 40°C it would be 1-2%/week.
    So if @wft lives someplace warm without air conditioning or kept the laptop next to a radiator then it would be perfectly normal.



  • @rc4 said:

    What's stopping them from adding a BIOS rootkit that runs on Linux?

    @hifi said:

    Wide variety of filesystems making it quite complicated to have one that successfully installs. Encrypted root filesystem is also a good way to prevent that.

    One thing: from what I remember, this rootkit uses a [url=http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/A/2/8A2FB72D-9B96-4E2D-A559-4A27CF905A80/windows-platform-binary-table.docx]shitass UEFI extension specified by Microsoft itself[/url] to inject rootkits. Also, it's not a code that magically executes, it requires cooperationcollaboration and support from the OS. Modern OS kernels very rarely even rely on EFI runtime service or BIOS calls, especially if they have native driver support.

    So, this is Windows-specific. If anyone tried to support it on Linux, I would expect a very hilarious response from Linus. Good luck with shipping preinstalled backdoored Linux systems, as I always roll my own. Again: Friends don't let friends use the preinstalled shit, no matter what platform.



  • Okay, but that doesn't make Lenovo not scummy.



  • @hifi said:

    Can you even enable BitLocker during any type of Windows install

    What kind of question is that? Uh, yeah?



  • No, I seriously didn't know that. I don't remember seeing an option during Windows 10 Pro install.



  • Oh, from the windows setup? I don't think so, but we pre-provision bitlocker in OSD here.

    Turning BitLocker on after setup is pretty easy though.


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