How do I prevent battery from swelling and not lose desktops

You have a bigger problem than 8 desktops getting consolidated into 1.

It is dangerous to ignore a swelling battery for any amount of time.

A swelling battery is a serious fire hazard. If it reaches the point of thermal runaway, or swells enough to get a puncture, you will have a fire burst that you cannot easily put out. Your precious Mac will be toast and maybe also your house. Shut it down, get it out of the house and take it to an authorized service center.

MartinR wrote:

You have a bigger problem than 8 desktops getting consolidated into 1.

It is dangerous to ignore a swelling battery for any amount of time.

A swelling battery is a serious fire hazard. If it reaches the point of thermal runaway, or swells enough to get a puncture, you will have a fire burst that you cannot easily put out. Your precious Mac will be toast and maybe also your house. Shut it down, get it out of the house and take it to an authorized service center.

+1

There is a video on YouTube where a PC repair shop intentionally mistreated a Windows laptop (electrically) to demonstrate what can happen when lithium batteries go bad.

First the laptop started to smoke. Then fire burst out and the keyboard of the laptop turned into a toxic, open-air grill. Then the pressure from the battery THREW a flaming chunk of the laptop out into the test room (a garage). The narrators went on to explain how dangerous this kind of fire was, since the battery had the chemistry that it needed to continue to burn even if deprived of oxygen.

Lithium batteries can store a lot of energy. That's why everyone uses them. It's also what makes them dangerous in the rare cases where they do start swelling.

The time to worry about consolidating 8 desktops into 1 is after you address the battery problem!

kelleymolinaro wrote:

I'm afraid to shut down because all the items on my eight desktops will consolidate to one desktop. But my battery is swelling so I need to do something different. Please help.

I would shut down and get the battery issue addressed .

In or out of warranty you can get a free over the counter 'Apple Service Diagnostics' test /assessment

Make an appointment for a "hardware issue"

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Learn how to optimize the life of the battery in your Mac notebook, fix battery issues, and get service.

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+1 on on the others' recommendations and to add, swelling can increase dramatically every day. Do not delay in having Apple evaluate. The longer the swollen battery is there, the greater the damage to expensive internal bits and, worse, the computer may become unrepairable.

kelleymolinaro wrote:

I'm afraid to shut down because all the items on my eight desktops will consolidate to one desktop. But my battery is swelling so I need to do something different. Please help.

Make sure you have a back up of all your data. A swelling battery needs to be examined by an authorized service center. There is nothing we remote users can do about a hardware issue.