Have you ever replaced cells to fix a dead laptop battery?

[MetroMPG]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

If you need a laptop, I've got a Windows one that is about 8 years old if you want it. Battery should be working too... I'll get details if you're interested. Would put a fresh Win10 Enterprise install on it.

Mighty kind offer. Thanks.

I don't really need another old computer, just messing around.

That, and shipping would make it highly uneconomical.

(Though I've always thought that we have enough members here to set up an old-school "BBS" type of relay shipping system. As long as you're not in a hurry...)

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by MetroMPG

Mighty kind offer. Thanks.

I don't really need another old computer, just messing around.

That, and shipping would make it highly uneconomical.

(Though I've always thought that we have enough members here to set up an old-school "BBS" type of relay shipping system. As long as you're not in a hurry...)

Reminds me back in the day when cell phones were super expensive and very unreliable. I was envisioning a "cellular" network where users handsets were the relay between endpoints, with no fixed towers.

Looks like I'll be headed to Sandpoint ID next week, which is the closest to Canada I ever get.

[freebeard]

Reminds me back in the day when cell phones were super expensive and very unreliable. I was envisioning a "cellular" network where users handsets were the relay between endpoints, with no fixed towers.

Your search term is 'Mesh Networking'.

Revisiting this thread reminds me of the Apple Pismo laptop [I still have]. It has swappable bays in the sides, one for the battery and one for a CD-ROM drive or a 2nd hot-swappable battery. I probably have 6 batteries somewhere as well.

From the last century, with a 400 Mhz processor.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by freebeard

Your search term is 'Mesh Networking'.

Revisiting this thread reminds me of the Apple Pismo laptop [I still have]. It has swappable bays in the sides, one for the battery and one for a CD-ROM drive or a 2nd hot-swappable battery. I probably have 6 batteries somewhere as well.

From the last century, with a 400 Mhz processor.

Must be from around the era I bought my first laptop. The CTX EXBook 700 was trash. Drives would fail, the battery didn't last long (I think it was NiMh).

I was top bidder in an Egghead auction, and even though it was cheap, it was all a high school kid could afford on a 12hr per week paycheck.

The neat thing was the CPU was upgradable, so I did it. Hardware failure was common, so that's probably what got me comfortable tearing into computers and contributed to my career trajectory. If the thing doesn't work, you can't make it any worse by opening it up and fiddling.

[freebeard]

Somewhere at the bottom of a pile, is an Apple Newton and a Powerbook 100 [IIRC purchased 2nd hand]. My first hands-on experience was with the Apple ][.

PowerBook 100
The PowerBook 100 is a portable subnotebook personal computer designed and manufactured by Sony for Apple Computer and introduced on October 21, 1991, at the COMDEX computer expo in Las Vegas, Nevada. Priced at US$2,500 with external floppy drive, the PowerBook 100 was the low-end model of the first three simultaneously released PowerBooks. Wikipedia

In the mid-nineties I rode the city bus to work, [re]reading Edgar Rice Burrough's Barsoomian novels on the Newton.

[MetroMPG]

I literally still have a Commodore 64 cassette memory drive in a closet. Why...

---

So plan B! It occurred to me in my collection of crap I had a dead laptop with a known good battery!



So I tore it apart & put 3 cells into the battery of the computer in question, made sure the contacts were good and clicked it into the machine.

Hallelujah! The charging light came on when I plugged it in! The charging icon showed as well.

... And then it went out 10 seconds later.

And the machine won't run on the battery alone even though I know the cells are charged.

So maybe the cell capacity and voltage are slightly different from the factory cells and the computer's not happy about it. Whatever it is, I'm done messing around with it.

Heads to fleabay... clicks "buy it now".

[freebeard]

I recall sitting a the kitchen table with my son when he was about eight, when we decided to take a pocket calculator apart to see if we could fix it.

When the last screw came out the halves sprung apart and keys and springs went all over the table, We just swept it into a bucket.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by freebeard

I recall sitting a the kitchen table with my son when he was about eight, when we decided to take a pocket calculator apart to see if we could fix it.

When the last screw came out the halves sprung apart and keys and springs went all over the table, We just swept it into a bucket.

What! Tossed the coveted "mechanical" calculator?

Everything's better when they make a mechanical racket, dontcha know.

Never trust maths that wasn't derived with levers, pulleys and gears.

[freebeard]

Whatever put it together in the first place had like 72 fingers.

It's all been downhill since the abacus. Slide rules are Okay for significant digits, but abaci are digital.

Neurological analysis
Learning how to calculate with the abacus may improve capacity for mental calculation. Abacus-based mental calculation (AMC), which was derived from the abacus, is the act of performing calculations, including addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, in the mind by manipulating an imagined abacus. It is a high-level cognitive skill that runs calculations with an effective algorithm. People doing long-term AMC training show higher numerical memory capacity and experience more effectively connected neural pathways.[52][53] They are able to retrieve memory to deal with complex processes

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abacus#Neurological_analysis

You won't connect your motor memory to the result with a pocket calculator, it's too obscured.