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The front of my laptop was expanding. I assumed the battery was in the back, so that this was frame warping or something, but then did research and found I was wrong. The expansion seemed to progress by the day, so I found a computer store open today (Sunday), and they confirmed yep, battery swollen in every cell, and strongly urged against continuing to use it. I was happier to comply when I realized you could use a laptop without a battery at all. As for getting a new battery... it hurts to not be in the US. Amazon could have gotten me a 3rd party battery tomorrow... if I were in Toronto. Vancouver? Wait a week. The store later said they found an unused OEM battery, 2-3 days, CA$290 for batt/service/shipping, vs. the CA$70 of Amazon but waiting a week and paying someone to install the thing since I lack the tools. I decided to splurge on the real battery and speed.
I also recalled that my replacement non-HP charger cord had been finicky, sometimes switching to not charging due to a lame wire or something. Not a big deal with a battery in, but bad when any fluctuation means shutdown! So I invested in a new charger, too. I have a lot of job stuff to do, I would like to not lose work or video in the middle of things. The charger was actually the only thing I paid for in the store; they texted about finding a battery later. But while they were at it they also cleaned out my power ports and I guess other internals, of dust, for free. Even my keyboard and clickpad feel very different now. The clickpad just *works* with barely any pressure, so weird... I'm thinking I should take laptops in for cleanings more regularly, the way I took my bike for annual tune-ups.
As for the battery, it seems expensive, but a similar new laptop would cost a couple thousand (especially up in Canada), and new battery + dust removal = new lease of life, I think.
(Linux geekery ahead)
Speaking of not losing work, I decided to invest effort in protection there. I can't do much about the Windows host OS, hopefully it can take care of itself, and I don't do much in it that could lose data, but I know from experience that my Linux virtual machine suddenly shutting down can lead to crankiness. So I explored ext4 filesystem mount options, exceeding the experience of even an ex-sysadmin friend. Also did some crude measurements of the effect on I/O, running "yes > y" for a second before ^C and seeing the size of file y.
Base state data=ordered,relatime: 800 MB/s
data=journal: 300 MB/s. adding nodelalloc (no delayed allocation of disk blocks) and commit=1 (commit the journal every second, vs. default 5 sec) didn't make a clear difference on top of that.
sync: 18 MB/s. Whoops!
Does it matter? Well, it would if I were copying a lot around my filesystem, but I'm not. There's downloading... but speedtest said I get 123 Mb/s down, which is like 15 MB. Likewise an rsync of a big file reports 15 MB/s. So it doesn't seem I can get data faster than I can write it, even now. There's SSD life, maybe, but this is just for a few days until I get a battery again and don't have to worry about oopses with the power cable.
Edit: of course, all the filesystem stuff may be moot if Windows 10 crashed and corrupted the virtualbox files... thus part of why I got a new charger.
Edit 2: I adapted https://docs.microsoft.com/en-US/troubleshoot/windows-server/backup-and-storage/turn-disk-write-caching-on-off to turn off write caching. This had a further hit to performance: now I only get 1 MB/s! OTOH, it can be toggled off and on at run time without rebooting (take that, Linux), so if I urgently need to download something big, I could. In the meantime, I feel the host OS is more robust now.
I also recalled that my replacement non-HP charger cord had been finicky, sometimes switching to not charging due to a lame wire or something. Not a big deal with a battery in, but bad when any fluctuation means shutdown! So I invested in a new charger, too. I have a lot of job stuff to do, I would like to not lose work or video in the middle of things. The charger was actually the only thing I paid for in the store; they texted about finding a battery later. But while they were at it they also cleaned out my power ports and I guess other internals, of dust, for free. Even my keyboard and clickpad feel very different now. The clickpad just *works* with barely any pressure, so weird... I'm thinking I should take laptops in for cleanings more regularly, the way I took my bike for annual tune-ups.
As for the battery, it seems expensive, but a similar new laptop would cost a couple thousand (especially up in Canada), and new battery + dust removal = new lease of life, I think.
(Linux geekery ahead)
Speaking of not losing work, I decided to invest effort in protection there. I can't do much about the Windows host OS, hopefully it can take care of itself, and I don't do much in it that could lose data, but I know from experience that my Linux virtual machine suddenly shutting down can lead to crankiness. So I explored ext4 filesystem mount options, exceeding the experience of even an ex-sysadmin friend. Also did some crude measurements of the effect on I/O, running "yes > y" for a second before ^C and seeing the size of file y.
Base state data=ordered,relatime: 800 MB/s
data=journal: 300 MB/s. adding nodelalloc (no delayed allocation of disk blocks) and commit=1 (commit the journal every second, vs. default 5 sec) didn't make a clear difference on top of that.
sync: 18 MB/s. Whoops!
Does it matter? Well, it would if I were copying a lot around my filesystem, but I'm not. There's downloading... but speedtest said I get 123 Mb/s down, which is like 15 MB. Likewise an rsync of a big file reports 15 MB/s. So it doesn't seem I can get data faster than I can write it, even now. There's SSD life, maybe, but this is just for a few days until I get a battery again and don't have to worry about oopses with the power cable.
Edit: of course, all the filesystem stuff may be moot if Windows 10 crashed and corrupted the virtualbox files... thus part of why I got a new charger.
Edit 2: I adapted https://docs.microsoft.com/en-US/troubleshoot/windows-server/backup-and-storage/turn-disk-write-caching-on-off to turn off write caching. This had a further hit to performance: now I only get 1 MB/s! OTOH, it can be toggled off and on at run time without rebooting (take that, Linux), so if I urgently need to download something big, I could. In the meantime, I feel the host OS is more robust now.