How to bypass Windows 10's auto shutdown on "Critical battery level" when the battery is dead?

Question

If your battery is “critically low” in Windows 10, you get about 45 seconds before it will automatically shut down “for your own good.” Well, if you have a computer with a bad battery, your computer is now perpetually in the state of having a critically low battery. AND should you want to change this setting, you’d better hope you have another computer around to research the fix, because once again, you have 30-45 seconds to fix it. And then you restart and try again. And again. And again.

There is also no option in Power Options > Advanced settings > Battery to tell it to do nothing when it’s critically low. The only options are Sleep, Shutdown or Hibernate. Critical battery level also cannot be set to 0%.

Answer 1

You’ll be needing to run this particular command in an elevated command prompt (Start > type "command" > right-click, Run as Administrator):

powercfg -setdcvalueindex SCHEME_CURRENT SUB_BATTERY BATACTIONCRIT 0 

This gives you the "Do nothing" option for the computer to not Shutdown/Sleep/Hibernate even when it's at the "Critical battery level" Since you don't have more than 30-45 seconds at a time to do anything, typing it all in will be very hard.

Ready for the expert tip?

Remove the battery.

It’s kind of like car safety inspections in my state: you don’t need a windshield, but if you have one, it cannot have a crack in it, because a windshield with a crack in it can’t contain you as well in the event of a wreck.