I’ve been considering getting a mini PC for my living room, basically only to watch online videos without ads or watch locally stored videos.
Since I have a Steam deck available that I already often dock to my screen for gaming, could I use it instead of buying a new computer?
My main concern is the impact this would have on the battery if it’s plugged in for long periods of time, does it bypass the battery when it’s plugged in and the battery is full ? Will other components be impacted?
As I mention always whenever this topic comes up, it might be my specific setup but don’t leave it off and plugged into a dock for long periods of time: it seems to discharge the battery and not realizing it’s happened. In my experience as long as you unplug it after shutting it off, there’s no downside.
That’s a good point. I lose about 5% a from the charge limit after a whole day of the Deck being plugged in and mostly on. I suppose doing a weekly power cycle could also work.
There’s also the BIOS setting that turns the Deck on when connected to AC, just in case it does run out of battery and won’t turn on after a power outage.
What I’m describing is really nasty, as you think the battery is let’s say at 95% and you unplug it to be used as ha handheld. It’s updating a few games and you turn around, do something else… then check back on the updates and the Deck is off because it ran out of battery in a couple of minutes. I don’t think it’s good for the battery to be drained that much
I dont think this is normal behaviour, maybe theres a problem with your dock? I leave mine docked and plugged in for weeks at a time, and when i have picked it up to play handheld its always been at 90-95%. Never had it be below 90 after being plugged into the dock.
It does show up as nice and charged, but (in my instance) it’s very much not. As I mentioned it might be my specific setup. My theory is that something I plugged in keeps drawing power even after the Deck is off, but when the Deck is off, the charger doesn’t send power… so it uses up the battery.
Well that sounds like theres a problem with the charging circuit/battery readout. It shouldnt be reading as charged if its not, and afaik, it should still charge even if the deck is off.
That’s really extreme, I’m pretty sure that’s now at all how it should be working.
I don’t leave my deck docked that long, maybe 10 hours at the longest, but I’ve never seen anything like the battery drop you’re describing.
In a day it won’t really show up, that’s not enough time in my experience. Also key here is that the Deck needs to be off: if it’s on then everything works as intended.
Oh ok, I never shut my deck off. Closest I get is restarting to install updates.
That’s very alarming!
Thankfully, I’ve not had this issue, I can see the battery go down very slowly over the day once it stops charging while plugged in. I normally play games in the evening on the battery, and haven’t noticed any reduced capacity in the last couple of years…
Hopefully, before I get something like this I’d’ve finally built a new PC 😁
Yeah, it’s not a sudden thing: I believe it takes a few days just to have a noticeable impact. It’s just that my Deck lives on the dock for most of the time XD