Dynabook TECRA A50-J annoyance

Today I was running my laptop on battery. Not intentionally. I had unplugged it to move earlier and had neglected to plug it back in when I returned.

I was concentrating on what I was doing, so didn't notice that the battery was running low. No audio alert because I had disabled all the system sounds.

So the battery ran down and the system fairly abruptly shut down. The system is set to shut down when battery falls to 10% of capacity.

I plugged it in within 10 seconds of it shutting down, waited a few seconds then pressed the power button.

The keyboard backlight lit for about a second, as it usually does when powering up. Then nothing.

I waited a few seconds then pressed the power button again, with the same result.

I kept waiting, then trying. Sometimes the keyboard backlight would come on briefly but sometimes not even that.

After a couple of minutes, the keyboard backlight came on briefly, then all went dark but then the screen backlight came on. But no Dynabook logo appeared. I thought it might be doing some sort of POST and waited. After somewhere between 30 and 60 seconds, it shut down again.

I kept waiting and trying, with the keyboard backlight coming on briefly but usually nothing more.

Finally, after about five minutes being plugged in, it finally booted normally.

The whole time it had full power: it was plugged in and powered up. Any reasonable laptop could have run without any battery at all.

But not the Dynabook TECRA A50-J. Evidently, it can't run without a battery, even when it has full power.

People have been making personal computers for almost 50 years now. Making laptops, or at least portable computers with batteries for almost as long. Dynabook wasn't a novice company when it designed and built its TECRA A50-J. But this behaviour, they thought, was acceptable.

I don't think I'll be buying another Dynabook computer. I had a Toshiba Satellite previously. Used it for many years. It was a tank, except for the too delicate case. After about a decade, I finally gave up on it because the last time the mounts for the screen had failed I had potted them up in epoxy and glued the case shut: too many of the clips and screw sockets had failed. When the mounts failed again, I couldn't open it to glue it back together without doing more damage. I also thought it would be nice to have something lighter, with longer battery life.

The Dynabook has been OK. The paint came off many of the keycaps within a few months. But the battery can't be replaced without opening it up and not being able to run without a battery is stupid.

I've only had it for about 3.5 years, but it's time to start looking for a new laptop, before they're all unavoidably infested with Microsoft AI.

Debian 13 on HP 665 G11 laptop

Today I installed Debian 13 on a new HP 665 G11 laptop that came with Windows 11 pre-installed in 1TB SSD. It's not well tested yet but superficially it seems fine.

I created only local Windows 11 accounts on the laptop.

I used Windows Disk Manager to shrink the Windows C drive to make space, reducing it to 250GB.

I disabled BitLocker Device Encryption, which was enabled by default, though I don't think it had encrypted the device yet: I could not export recovery keys. After dire warnings that it would take a long time to decrypt the disk, it was complete in under a minute but, again, I suspect the disks weren't encrypted, pending login to a Windows account.

I downloaded the Debian 13 network install image and copied it to USB using `sudo cp /dev/sda` on another system running Linux.

Getting to the BIOS/Boot menus is a nuisance. Power on and keep pressing Esc or F10 quickly/repeatedly. I don't know when it checks but sometimes it notices and brings up the BIOS/Boot menu. Otherwise it starts Windows 11 again and I had to go round and try again: too many times.

I disabled secure boot. I might try re-enabling it later. I expect the laptop has the new Microsoft keys but haven't confirmed and don't want trouble when the old key expires. I don't need the secure boot security, given the intended use of the laptop.

Then I booted from USB and installed Debian. It took about half an hour, mostly due to my slow Internet connection, making it slow to download all the software. I installed basic system with XFCE desktop.

Now it boots to Debian by default but boot to Windows 11 works.

Wireless network works fine. I haven't explored all the other hardware, bluetooth, power management, etc. but I am optimistic that any problems can be resolved before too long.

It was quick and easy. It took less time to install Debian than for Windows to download all its updates and I don't think it is done yet: whenever I was running Windows 11 my network was overloaded despite me setting download limits on Windows Update for 0.5Mbps background an 1Mbps foreground.