A number of my friends have had to do this recently, often involving major surgery to try to get the battery out without breaking (a) it (with consequent acid spillage, fire, etc.) or (b) the laptop in question.
(I liked phones with replaceable batteries, but fashion)
Actually, for my old Dell this was apparently quite easy to remove the battery. I have been inside that laptop before and itâs quite well organised inside:
So right now the stupid Q is working again. Iâll keep observing. Havenât ordered anything yet. But a replacement is in my shopping basket.
I used to be in the user replaceable battery camp, but the size and weight reduction is nice. So is the capacity improvement from a battery that doesnât have to survive being in a pocket.
Iâm willing to pay someone a few bucks to change a battery. (My last phone, the shop charged about $10 more than I could have got the battery for. Totally worth it.)
I somehow destroyed my windows installationânot all of it just some important features. the WSL subsytem and I have no idea how to get it back. 
something something hyper-v. I tried something with a bridge. it all crashed and after a reboot the internet suggested things that I did to re-enable it and now I donât have wsl anymore. and I donât know anyone really using this thing and so I have no idea who to ask. the internet as usual is not helpful when things get complicated. reinstalling failed. I just need to cry for a bit.
I expect with some more hours of work I will possibly get the featuer back. lots of work. i really wanted to stop working hours ago.
Disable Hyper-V in the Windows Features dialog
Which flavour of windows are you using?
Thank you 
Windows 10 probably basic edition which came with my very expensive laptop.
There is no âHyper-Vâ feature in my windows. Just Windows Virtual Platform and Windows Hypervisor Platform.
I did turn everything off and on again and reinstalled the thing losing all the data inside. Mostly that data was related to work which I can mostly copy from my actual work computer with another 2 hours of work or so.
My own data is not on there as I was working in the windows directories.
So then itâs just re-installing docker, ansible and vagrant.
The WSL instances are still there, they just donât show up. It can be a bit of a pain to try to re-register them, but I found a guide on the internet for finding those root paths and recovering the important data (the relevant /home/<user>/ mostly)
That would be pretty awesome. Though the work is mostly configuration stuffs. Maybe Iâll just take tomorrow off instead of Friday to fix thisâŚ
ps:
This is the mean little thing that I blame for all this.
Although Iâm not really following what youâre trying to do as itâs beyond my ken setting up students with windows home and wsl2 recently this was the solution to almost all windows home edition issues https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/29175/installation-of-hyper-v-on-windows-10-home.html
The problem is that I am not quite following what I am doing⌠which makes this not the first time I mess up. After a week-end of struggling with this kind of stuff, destroying the WSL was just the icing on the banana-cake (I hate bananas).
I am a bit afraid to mess with the hyper-v anymore at this point, so Iâll enjoy my fresh barebones wsl and if I cannot recover any of the old stuff⌠the worst thing I may have lost is a few hours of work.
I empathise with that. I had to start using docker-based things recently, and I donât mind admitting that I still donât even really know what a âcontainerâ is (or isnât). I do know that I dislike them immensely because what they generally donât âcontainâ is everything I expect to find in a VM, which makes my life harder than I would like it to be. I did enough reading and configuration to get to a point where I could actually do work, but itâs cumbersome, and I still hit problems with things which used to be absolutely trivial but are apparently now âhardâ. Sometimes the Brave New World kinda sucks.
Iâve almost got it back running, now I only struggle with some remaining docker stuffsâŚ
I am considering trying to run multiple instances of the WSL to be able to keep my work apart from my private experiments b/c work shouldnât be affected by whatever I am doing in my spare time.
I will also need to update my backup of wsl configurations.
My computer came up with a bluescreen today and performed a hardware check ⌠I donât really know. Windows⌠I am just too lazy though to run my laptop on linux. I struggled as much and more with that althought the aspects of the struggle were different and I usually felt more in control.
Join ussssâŚ
To be fair itâs not a thing I think everyone should do; almost nobody will sell a pre-Linuxed laptop and sometimes itâs a pain to get things working, even on Thinkpads which still seem to be the best Linux- laptop hardware. But Linux problems tend to be solved by learning more about them, while in the MS world thereâs a whole class of problem for which the answer is âthis has been deliberately disabled, pay more moneyâ.
I know. I used to run my hardware on Linux. First Suse, then Debian and finally Ubuntu. But then I started freelancing and everyone was developing software from windows which was deeply weird to me b/c I had been writing software exclusively under linux and a lot of the tools needed werenât freely available on windows (now with WSL some of them are). On top of all that connecting to other computers on windows was a PITA (putty ssh anyone?), copying files to other places was complicated (WinscpâŚ) and as a techie growing up in the 90s Microsoft was the âbig badâ to be avoided at all costs.
Since freelancing though, Iâve been working on windows computers and things have got better⌠and also gaming is much much much easier. B/c gaming tools on Linux is similar to dev-tools under Windows. Wine just doesnât cut it although I played WoW for years through that compromising on graphics and experiencing tons of issues my friends playing on windows just didnât have.
I am very much way too lazy to run dual boot. And now working from home I really have to stick with windows because I have no separate dev-laptop this time.
I hear that MacOS solves some of the issues by being based on unix but still has a lot of great games available to play. But despite owning an ipad which I love⌠I cannot bring myself to go further into the arms of the masters of walled gardens.
PS: and powershell is a) pretty recent and b) not near as good as any decent linux shell
Today I had to find a colleague who was actually at the office to reboot my remote computer.
I have neither met any of my colleagues nor my computer in person âŚ
Pandemic created a new job: the computer-reboot-person
Ah yes, I know that pain. In theory everyone in the team should be able to remote desktop into our test environment. Every now and then it seems the RDP server fails to start which means we normally have to wait until the perma-office team member turns up in the morning to reboot it.
In my case it seems the computer failed to complete some kind of updateâas is usual with the windows which is totally the reason why weâre all regularly checking windows update to prevent it from occurring while nobody is at the office.
Webcam, solenoid, broom handle. Faintly surprised nobodyâs built one already.
(Remote power bars are still ferociously expensive, alas.)
We have remote power strips for all our test equipment (our CI builds turn hardware on/off as required). We just donât have the controlling PCs plugged into them 
