Idiot checking: Laptop power cycle

[Dannar26]

Got a brand new laptop, certified refurb. Naturally I want to test things out...

So, after a full charge, I let the laptop battery fully discharge. The laptop ran its course, and then shut itself down.

Now, devil's advocate as I am, I power it on again. It takes me to a screen where it urges me to plug in, but gives me the ability to bypass by hitting F1. I do so.

The laptop runs out of power again, so at this point I'm pretty sure the battery is discharged. I plug it in with the power cable that it came with.

Well now I turn it on, and it wont boot to windows. It sits there saying "diagnosing" and eventually takes me to the windows 10 recovery blue screen. I thought it was odd, but you know how systems can be sometimes. I shrug, and let it restart.

It keeps going back to the recovery screen after it spends some time attempting to boot, then attempting to diagnose its own problems. I'm inferring that something in the boot file was corrupted.

So here's my question -- was I just too hard on the system, or should I be concerned that windows got corrupted by a drained battery? I'm still within the return period...

Dell Latitude e5270, i5 6300U, 8 GB single channel DDR4 RAM, 500 GB 7200 RPM HHD

***Update***
Currently repairing the windows install. We'll see what happens next. I was a bit quick to take action here...would letting the battery charge a bit more have helped? I would be inclined to doubt it, because the power level of the battery is unrelated to file integrity in a storage device...

 

[Ketchup]

Today's laptops have Lithium Ion batteries. Fully draining these batteries is the fastest way to kill them. You laptop is giving you a hard time because (it sounds like) it ran out of power during the boot process. This is the process where windows is constantly loading data into RAM, and possibly making changes to system files, so it is no surprise that a loss of power here could result in data corruption.

You should be fine once the re-install finishes. But I would suggest not draining the battery in the future.

 

[Dannar26]

Understood. I thought my idiocy may be the case here.

I'm still living back in the day when you'd get a new phone, and you were encouraged to do a full power cycle with it before normal use. Guess that habit carried over to all my devices.

 

[JeffMD]

You didn't harm the battery much, lithium ion packs have had protection security to prevent full discharge for many years. What you did was interupt the Windows boot at a bad time. That is what Windows is diagnosing, the pc was shut down during file writes.

 

[corkyg]

A good test for the system that gets the battery out of the loop is to remove it completely and boot with AC adapter only.

 

[Dannar26]

I repaired the windows install, and everything is great so far. Just had to re-do some of my settings.

I'm pretty sure the guys above had the right of it. Something got screwed up at boot. I'll monitor this to make sure it's not a habit...anything's possible...but I think I'm alright now.

 

[Sheep221]

Is it completely safe to use laptop till it powers off, but with respect to keeping battery alive longer it is unnecessary step, as someone mentioned already, it's Li ion battery which means it has flexible charging cycles.

 

[Fardringle]

Is it completely safe to use laptop till it powers off, but with respect to keeping battery alive longer it is unnecessary step, as someone mentioned already, it's Li ion battery which means it has flexible charging cycles.

If you use the computer until it suddenly shuts down due to power loss, that's not "safe" as it is likely to cause file corruption. If you use it until Windows tells you that the battery is low and needs to be shut down, and then shut the system down properly, that's just fine as far as the file system is concerned, but repeatedly running the battery down that low can have an impact on the long term life of the battery.

 

[Sheep221]

If you use the computer until it suddenly shuts down due to power loss, that's not "safe" as it is likely to cause file corruption. If you use it until Windows tells you that the battery is low and needs to be shut down, and then shut the system down properly, that's just fine as far as the file system is concerned, but repeatedly running the battery down that low can have an impact on the long term life of the battery.

You only have chance to completely drain laptop battery when you using DOS or something or have battery that is old and has sudden voltage drops. Any modern OS will warn minutes before discharge and will hibernate the session before turning off.

Also sudden power off doesn't necessarily mean you will corrupt data or file system it just means that chance of it happening is greater.