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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

Huh... that's annoying. 95% of the time, I use the laptop in my home office and don't really want to mess around with plugging/unplugging it:-/

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For desk use, it's best for your battery to remove it from the laptop once it's fully charged. You don't want to continuously plug/unplug your laptop because that would just cycle the battery a lot, and that's not good for it either.

As for me, I usually just leave the battery in: it's a nice UPS, worth the expense of perhaps a few months of lost life.

Do you know if one can hot swap batteries (which would also allow simply removing or adding it) on most laptops that will run without a battery? I want to try removing the battery from my computer while it's running or putting one in while it's running, but I'm a little afraid of death.

I've never had problems hot-swapping batteries on my laptops while they're plugged in, at least with my Gateway.

If you're laptop is plugged in you should be able to hot swap the battery. If you're worried about data loss, put your machine to sleep first, wait ~10 seconds, swap the batteries, wake it up from sleep. This is safe even if your machine loses power totally while swapping out the batteries.

OSX and Windows both support writing out your ram to disk, losing all power, then resuming from this state exactly where you left off when power is restored.

It's the default on OSX and may need to be enabled on Windows depending on your hardware: http://maximumpcguides.com/windows-7/turn-hybrid-sleep-on-in...

Yeah, I've done it after hibernating, but hibernating and waking up from it is like a 3-minute process for me.

It's not data loss I'm afraid of (I always save, even moreseo if I'm doing stuff that might make my computer turn off), it's like sparks and other such stuff that can happen when you're dealing with electricity.

I hot swap all the time, even if the computer is plugged in there should be no problem with sparks or anything like that.

Same here. Almost never unplug unless I need it for a meeting or am traveling. Seems to be fine after almost 2 years. Good enough for me.

What about running it through a 6 outlet switch that you can readily turn on/off?

The problem is that I shouldn't have to do anything. The computer should be able to figure this stuff on its own - after all, that's the kind of task that they're good for.

Oh, the "computer" (read: the manufacturer) has it all figured out already, rest assured. They just don't want to give up on a few performance percentage points.

Or, more likely, selling you replacement batteries.

Ok, but at the same time, they could also tack some money on to the price for "batter life extending technology" and make money that way...

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