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How do you power them? Via the battery? I was thinking about turning my old mbp into a build machine, but i am a bit concerned with running it via the battery 24/7
Why the concern?

I feel like The Internet has this urban myth that says keeping a charged battery plugged in all the time will eventually cause it to explode and burn your house down, guaranteed.

I get that keeping a battery at 100% charge is not great for it in terms of longevity (ability to hold a charge). And it's obvious that heating the battery up by running the laptop at full tilt inside a backpack or something will turn it into a spicy pillow.

But I struggle to imagine the failure mode that reliably shows up when keeping the laptop powered on 24x7 that is never a problem for 8-16 hours of continuous use while plugged in (a very typical work day for my laptops).

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I usually disconnect the battery and just power them via USB-C. The battery on these old broken laptops is usually toast anyway...
you're lucky you're running into models that don't panic in some way without a battery.

for example some alienware and XPS models rely on the battery for amperage capacitance when their big onboard GPUs get busy; allows them to run cooler/less-wattage/smaller wall-warts but it also makes for a platform that'll crash when it hits a high GPU usage without a decent way to make up the amps.

'spose you could use a bigger power supply if you get bios/uefi to play nice. hard proposition sometimes with Dell products.

Well, of course I'm not getting old gaming/pro laptops with dedicated gpus, they would consume far too much power, require extensive cooling, and these are way too expensive anyway, even when broken. I usually get old, boring office laptops (lenovo/dell) from bulk resellers, with integrated graphics who are sufficiently used/broken so they are dirt cheap. As long as they still turn on, the mainboard is usually fine (I've yet to get a broken one).
You can just limit maximum charge (using something like aldente), then replace the battery every 4 years if you need extra peace of mind.

Batteries degrade much faster when fully cycled repeatedly, and even then just about any laptop battery can easily make it 6+ years with low-to-zero risk of failure.

Most old PC laptops have external batteries you can detach by pulling out on a springloaded tab. Even MacBooks are possible to run without the battery, but it requires some NVRAM trickery IIRC.
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Maybe put it on a timer, or have the laptop control its own outlet.
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