A huge upshot to using a laptop is you have a built-in UPS and KVM.
this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2026
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I had one active a good while back. To quote Buddy Guy '..ain't nuthin' wrong with that.' Hell, I have a 15 year old, self build computer. I use it daily. It works, and pretty well too.
If you haven't already, I'd see if you can run it sans battery, just power cord. Reason being, old laptop batteries can be a hazard. They can swell and burst, they can over heat,. In some cases, they can become a fire hazard. Best to be safe.
If you've already done so, then awesome , and ignore the second paragraph. Is this your first foray into selfhosting?
Ideally see if you can do a battery charge limit. Lithium batteries are happiest around 40-60% charge. If you can limit it that low then you keep your built in UPS, don't risk the CPU running at a crawl, and the battery is happy. Even just the normal 80% that good laptops offer will be sufficient.
Well, that's something to think about. I've always thought it best to take mine out. Tempting fate and all that.
Wow... Never thought about this ! To bad my battery died years ago ! Craptop still going strong though 👍💪
I have a machine that’s 12 years old, I built it back in the early 2010s. I have some extra video cards laying around so I slapped a 2080 in and it’s now a dedicated Beat Saber machine (I don’t touch Facebook or Google code on any device with PII, so I’ve really missed playing Beat Saber.)
It runs at 90+FPS no matter the song, and it’s got about 500 songs so far. I love that machine soooo much.
When I built mine, I purposefully spent the $$ for a long term service machine and stocked it with all the cutting edge tech of the day in it like SLI which was wildly popular then, maxed out the mobo with RAM to 96 GB, etc. It's no modern gaming machine, but it will handle most anything you throw at it.
Niiiiice! I did SLI 7900GTs when Crysis came out and it ran at like 40+ FPS even with explosions on screen! It cost me an unholy amount…
the machine I now use for Beat Saber wasn’t as crazy as the Crysis machine: it’s an i5-4790k, 16 or 32GB DDR3, and a couple SSDs. I replaced its 1070 just because I had a better card laying around. I hope it works well for many years to come! It’s also SOMEHOW inexplicably powered by a 500w bronze semi-modular PSU that seems like it’s going to go on forever into eternity… I hope so, it’s been so good to me!
some machines restrict cpu clock speed if there's no battery fyi. my 2008 macbook does this