Help for a new laptop user
ayrshire lass
Posts: 4,053 Forum Member
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My son has bought a new laptop and given me his old one, I have never had one before, as I prefer a desktop. However, the battery is dead, so he says it must be kept plugged in all the time. I hardly ever use it (prefer sitting at my desk)and feel I am wasting electricity by having it plugged in constantly. Will it do any harm to unplug? Sorry, but don't know much about laptops.
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The motherboard has it's own cmos battery, to keep basic settings, so it's really no different to having a desktop PC unplugged.
It doesn't sound like you do though. Unplug and plug it in when you need to use it, unplug it when you don't.
Thanks for advice, I understand it needs to be plugged in to use it ,as the battery is dead, but for some reason he told me to never unplug, probably because he kept it plugged in all the time as he used it such a lot, I imagine.
I'll plug it in and boot up each day. If I'm not going to use it for a while I'll just close the lid to put it into sleep mode which hardly uses any power, and it's instantly ready to go when you lift the lid again.
Last thing at night I'll shut it down properly and unplug.
Thanks, that's what I wanted to know , if it was using much power while plugged in. It has been in sleep mode for 3 days as I haven't been near it, now I know I can shut it down without any problems I am much happier.:)
The real time clock will stop so the data and time at boot up will be wrong. However if the operating system is configured to get it's time from an internet source that should correct itself. Things like disk drives and other hardware should auto detect on power up so shouldn't be a problem.
I've run PC's at work with dead BIOS batteries and about the biggest problem has been the warning notice it pops up every time the PC is switched on. The PCs have all worked perfectly fine once booted up.