[Havoc]

Ran an old laptop as home server for years.

It’s OKish as a starting point into selfhosted world but overall not ideal. The battery is a fire risk and the entire thermal design isn’t really geared towards 24/7 operation.

Not really something I’d co locate unless it was a DC physically near me so that stopping by is easy

[KronisLV]

> The battery is a fire risk and the entire thermal design isn’t really geared towards 24/7 operation.

I remember having this old Dell Latitude, where you could easily swap out the battery pack with a button/tab thing on the back, without having to open anything else up - I even got a spare bigger capacity battery, but it would work without one altogether when connected to the power brick.

I unironically think that all laptops should be built like that.

[Tade0]

First thing I learned attempting the same is that lid open vs closed are two very different situations in terms of thermals.

But overall without aggressive throttling these devices work a maximum of half an hour before the components get saturated with heat and performance tanks.

[Havoc]

Yup. Gaming laptops with dedicated GPUs tend to fare better on this because internally the CPU and GPU is often bridged with a heat pipe and shared cooling

So thermals are specd for both running at same time but you only need CPU for home server so shouldn’t throttle

[Fokamul]

Also running laptops as 4fun home servers and first thing I do is removing battery, removing whole chassis, even with screen.

You don't need any of those.

[ForHackernews]

I assume this startup yanks all the batteries and runs them in a rack with a UPS.

[whazor]

The FAQ says: > We might modify your laptop to remove or power down the battery

But powering down battery is not enough against the fire risk. Servers get hot 24/7 and might still overheat the battery.