It’s only a problem for people who always do what they’re told.

Which is why you use an electro-magnet.

You energize it, allow it to snap to the car pulling it forward slightly, then disengage it and use a motor in the arm to reset it to it’s original position.

Ah, that’s your problem, you’re buying Dell and HP laptops, which start off as e-waste. Their batteries have thermal issues while they’re still on the factory line and their laptop power supplies are engineered to die no more than 3 minutes after the warranty expires.

We’re probably talking past each other. I recommend switching to ASUS.

You’re arguing that something I’ve been doing for over a decade can’t be done.

Why? Look at my perspective. On one hand, I have 10+years of lived experience doing this thing, on the other hand there’s internet guy who says it can’t be done?

Just compare a mini-pc to a entry level laptop with the same specifications from any manufacturer.

An Asus NUC with no disk or ram and an Intel 250 (celeron) uses 65W of power and starts around $300. It has 2 cores at 1.8ghz and costs go up from there.

From the same manufacturer at the same time, I can find over 300 laptop SKUs at the below $300 price point to choose from including the entry level zenbook 14, which, in addition to being complete (having ram is nice) packs a significantly more powerful processor and only uses 45W.

Ok bro, you’re wrong and laptops haven’t come with removable batteries since before OP was born (probably).

Of course, I also took the lead acid batteries out of my ancient laptops before I e-wasted them and went down to the sock-hop and dinosaur ride.

Not sure, the battery doesn’t really get cycled, it doesn’t get hot, I have a few which are going strong after 10+ years (the useful life of the hardware).

It’s not a hypothetical for me.

I usually pick up the cheapest non-chromebook laptop I can find and put Linux on it.

There are a couple key advantages here:

1. It’s very cheap.
2. Battery Backup included.
3. Monitor and keyboard included.
4. Power efficient by design.
5. Available all the time from any vendor.
6. You can take it with you, update your server on the couch and slap it back on the rack.
7. Virtually any configuration you want in candy colors.
8. Did I mention these are very cheap?

It can be a bit tricky to find one with Ethernet and two SSDs is kinda exotic (especially because you could get two whole laptops for the cost of some NAS enclosures) but there are over 3000 different models under $300 on Amazon, I’m sure you can find something good.