I've yet to find a laptop mainboard that doesn't work without a battery. As I've written below, I'm getting extremely boring old office laptops with integrated graphics. Usually phones also work fine without a battery. However, I'm not touching phones because I will not fiddle with locked bootloaders and "the Android situation". Running plain Linux is a hard requirement for me.
> I've yet to find a laptop mainboard that doesn't work without a battery.
Intel MacBook Pro from 2014 works but throttles the CPU to 800 Hz making it barely usable.
The Framework laptop's motherboards can all be run without batteries. They have a 'standalone' mode you can toggle in the UEFI settings.
If only Frameworks were “extremely boring old office laptops” with costs reflecting that, instead of very interesting and desirable hardware for which people will pay a slightly lower than Apple premium.
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I'm just looking at an old Dell laptop refusing to boot without manual intervention because it looses its time setting since I removed its main battery. If I can fix that it'll become a very capable server for my home setup. Not sure it'll work though, as the bios can't be configured to ignore the time reset.
All old office laptops I had so far still had the good old CMOS/RTC battery... So if indeed the RTC is solely powered by the main battery, I would guess there's at least a backup capacitor somewhere so that it survives at least a short disconnect? If you can find that one, you can probably connect power there, but that's just me guessing...
It’s also possible that the laptop has a CMOS battery that is now dead.
there's an RTC indeed, I'll look further, thanks for the hint!