Can the zbook 15 g3 run without a battery?
I have a zbook 15 g3 that, when plugged into power, has a white charging indicator LED and the power button flashes and there are no other visible sign of life. Pressing the power button does nothing.
It’s been sitting for years so I knew the battery was shot so I wasn’t surprised at all to see this. I removed the battery and plugged it back in, expecting it to work like almost any other laptop I can think of, but the behavior is identical to when the battery is installed. The power button flashes and the laptop doesn’t turn on.
The battery is garbage and discharged to the point the BMS locked and wasn’t outputting anything, as I suspected. I disassembled the battery and manually charged the cells but the BMS is permanently bricked and I couldn’t get it to wake up, laptops batteries are always like this, waste of time. The battery is garbage and unsafe to use but it would’ve been nice if it powered the laptop to test since it’s a power source that at one point is known to have powered the laptop.
The charger I have isn’t a genuine HP one but it does charge other Zbook 15 models from other generations that are same wattage without issue (I’ve used it many times on a g7 and a few others but afaik never a g3) and it claims to work with the g3 as well. At the very least, the charger satisfies the input requirements on the back cover of the laptop.
So I’m undecided on what to do next until I find out if this laptop can run without a battery or not. Because either it can run without a battery and the fact it isn’t means I need both a new battery and to waste a weekend on the motherboard, or it doesn’t run without a battery and all I need is a battery.
(btw, I already tried easy things like removing the RAM, draining all power from the laptop, etc. and am still at square one. The laptop was working when put into storage years ago then handed over to me.)