11th Gen Laptop with weird wake up issues - Buyers beware

Community Support
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UPDATE October 13, 2022: Changed the title because I am no longer sure if this is a BIOS battery drain issue. I’ve sent 13 videos to the Support team today, to try and help with debugging. I won’t repeat today’s saga, just scroll to the 88th/89th posts of this thread.

Well, if nothing, this thread is an accumulation of all the weird and wonderful ways in which the 11th Gen may behave after unplugging it.

I won’t be making any more edits to this post. I will do one final reply if/when I hear back from Framework Support.

UPDATE October 3, 2022: Yay! Official response! I am going to keep my update on top of the page because of my rather inflammatory original post. But that did its job, got an official response. The title stays because the official response is a bit meh and people shouldn’t be buying the 11th gen if they expect a laptop. Two weeks of unplugged time isn’t quite acceptable for a new laptop. Desktop replacements, yeah sure.

Here it is Viability of an ML 1220 rechargable battery for RTC | CMOS (11th gen) - #43 by nrp

Now this response came a day after I ordered mine so poor suckers like me are stuck! As per this all 11th gen processor based boards (across all manufacturers) can have this issue. Which I am nodding to but disagreeing in my head!

I think the rechargeable battery was to mitigate this issue. I see almost every other manufacturer using it now. I don’t know though if all 11th gen laptops have this issue, I don’t have time to scour other forums. I still think the exact sequence of events isn’t being truly portrayed. I guess Framework found out too late in the manufacturing cycle about the bug and they had too many on order to throw away, so they waited until their gen 12 board was ready and then revealed it. I’ll cut them slack for that. But it still grinds my gears that I wasn’t given a choice to make an informed decision.

The sad thing is Framework have a motherboard reset page but no official warning as to why they have it. I saw a meme in one of the threads, “it comes with a screwdriver, because you’ll need it” (okay okay I am being mean now)! I really loved this laptop and the concept. But feeling severely let down.

I will update my support experience in the thread!

UPDATE 2 October 3, 2022
A little more data on my usage, just to show my usage pattern. I am surprised Windows is showing 100% battery for the last week. Maybe I didn’t notice the Battery charge % had been reset earlier to 100%, or it was reset when I upgraded to BIOSv 3.10 a few days ago. The bundle download date is showing 21st September, but I am sure I installed it over a weekend because it needed a reboot.

As evident, laptop is plugged in most of the time. Those little dips below 100 are overnight, when I simply close the lid unplug the laptop and disconnect all USB devices.
30th night I used it and didn’t plug it back in. Then it stayed off most of the day, until late 1st night, when I used it a bit and shut it down. Next day morning, the RTC was drained. So it took little over 2 days of continuously being off power for the RTC to die completely.

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Original
Framework should stop selling the 11th Gen Laptop “at a discount” when they know and yet refuse to officially acknowledge the BIOS battery drain issue which results in laptop failing to boot/wake up from sleep when unplugged for 2-3 days.

All their claims of temporary fix/workarounds are pointless because you can’t use the 11th Gen laptop in a professional setting. You just don’t know, once you’ve unplugged the laptop, whether it will startup again or not!

I had held out on the hope that there will be a software fix, but looks like it is a h/w design bug and it won’t get fixed in software. In this light, continuing to sell the 11th gen laptop at a discount is disgraceful.

If you have loads of stock, sell them as DIY boards that people can use to build low powered desktop units. Continuing to sell them as laptop erodes faith in the company and I for one will not be recommending Framework to anyone until this is officially acknowledged!

Wonder where is LinusTech on this!

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This may be a case of sample bias, but this is probably not nearly as widespread an issue as you think it is. I have never once had this issue with my 11th gen.

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It is only not an issue if you use your laptop always plugged in! Laptop by definition is portable, and I shouldn’t have to futz around with it everytime I take it off power!

Maybe you are showing your sample bias here!

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I said this in another post regarding the 11th gen board:
We’re in the desktop replacement laptop market…we just didn’t know about it

The general expectation of laptops is that: If I press the power button, and the main battery has charge, the laptop should / is expected to power up / POST 1000 times out of 1000 times. Charge of RTC battery should not be a blocker for POST.

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Wonder where is LinusTech on this!

Here is LTT’s opinion on this issue.

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@Second_Coming well said! I would have sold mine off if it weren’t my daily driver. I don’t have that kind of disposable cash to drop another 2K on another laptop while I wait for it to sell. Also, rather unethical to sell it without disclosing this issue. So bye bye any value out of it.

My laptops last me a good 5 years. Until then desktop usage it is!

What a shame!

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@junaruga thanks for that… typical YT meh!

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It really is a shame. I have this issue with my Framework 11th gen CONSTANTLY.

I’ve been in talks with Framework support on it, and while I commend them for being communicative, they have offered no workaround or resolution. It’s the same “have you tried mainboard reset?” and “let the laptop sit on the charger for 24 hours” recommendations from support over and over again. Which, by the way, never resolves the issue for long.

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“…the BIOS battery drain issue which results in laptop failing to boot when unplugged for 2-3 days”

This is simply incorrect. The BIOS battery will last ~20 days when fully charged and the machine is left unplugged. The main battery has a short life if the machine is in suspend, but that’s a different issue, and easily worked around by shutting down or hibernating. Some may find that inconvenient, and that is a fair criticism.

Is the machine perfect? No. There definitely are some design issues with the 11th gen board, but you grossly overstate them. For some people they will be showstoppers based on their use profile. For others they won’t. The original post and much of the thread are unnecessarily inflammatory, and one could assert them to be willful fearmongering. Please do better.

@nmiles - sorry to hear that you’re continuing to have issues. I saw in another thread that a poster purchased a replacement rechargeable rtc battery and had better results. You might ask Support if they will send you one. No, it won’t do away with the ~20 days to zero issue, but if you’re seeing shorter rundown times than that, it’s worth a try. Best of luck.

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@lbkNhubert you are just being a cheerleader! I have posted 5 threads spanning over a year, not one has an assertion from Framework on the root cause!

What works for you, doesn’t work for others!

I will accept if this is officially acknowledged, until then Framework is being duplicitous by continuing to sell the laptop!!!

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…or view as ‘completely brushed under the rug for any potential 11th gen customers’.

Your point is that it fits some use cases, and not some use cases. This particular design issue / flaw should be something that’s documented up front, IMO, so the customers can decide without digging into forums. It’s a use case suitability decision input / info. …which goes to transparency.

Specifically, this issue seems to differ from the default expected laptop behaviour. i.e. Framework specific. If it were something less Framework specific…such as “Does it have 2 or 1 m.2. slots…?”…that’s up to the end-user to look up in product spec.

Regarding ‘being a cheerleader’ (or whatever wording to that effect)…It’s good to be a cheerleader, to have something you align with…but make sure you do it for the betterment of the company…and users, not just the company.

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@Sumit - I understand that you are frustrated, but you would do well to attempt to channel those frustrations towards working to achieve a resolution rather than spamming multiple threads. You believe that I am cheerleading, and you are entitled to your opinion. I’ve laid out why and how I have the opinion that I have elsewhere on the board, if you are so inclined to search for the threads. I won’t reproduce them here, other than to remind you and others that this is a first-generation product from a new company, and as such, bumps are to be expected. I think that the company’s response has been sufficient, you don’t. We’re unlikely to agree. There is an issue, in most cases it is not critical and can be avoided by taking certain measures. If those aren’t working for you then your next step would be to work with Support to determine why you are being impacted to a greater extent.

I made no statement about what works for me. As noted, if you are finding that your machine won’t start after a few days then you have an outlier case and Support hopefully can work with you to resolve it.

Framework is free to sell the laptop as they see fit. You can claim that they are being duplicitous all that you want, but your claiming it doesn’t make it so.

Have a good day.

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This doesn’t sound right to me. For a year now, I’ve almost exclusively used my 11th Gen laptop without being plugged in. I typically power off when I’m done using it and only put it on the charger for a short time every day or two after the battery drops to maybe 40-70% (with light usage, it sometimes takes a while to get there… I’ve been reading in Firefox for the past two hours and the battery is still at 91%).

Should I be able to reproduce your issue by leaving it powered off and unplugged for three days?

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@Second_Coming - I hope that you are doing well. We view things differently.

I disagree regarding cheerleading. I would say that I chose to purchase a new machine from a new company with the expectations that things may not be perfect. With that said, anyone who is experiencing problems should reach out to Support to achieve resolution. I did so for a couple of issues on my machine and was able to get them resolved.

Have a good afternoon.

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We seem to have three camps of people / users regarding this issue / behaviour:

  1. It doesn’t affect them base on their use case.
  2. It affects them base on their use case, and not able to augment the use case to work around it.
  3. It affects them base on their use case., but able to work around it.

Regardless of whether it affects you, at the individual level, or not, I personally believe this behaviour (at the product level) should be made visible at the time of purchase. The simple concept of “No surprises” goes a long way.

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@tim300 thanks for that. Maybe you got lucky, maybe you hit the right sweet spot for your usage. Good to know it works for some.

I prefer not to shutdown my laptop. It isn’t a workaround I would use.
That seems to be the only differentiator in our use cases.

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@Sumit - what OS are you running, and is your issue that the main battery drains quickly when in sleep/suspend, that the machine powers off and won’t reboot without being plugged in or the RTC battery removed (be careful if you do this, the holder is fragile) to effect a mainboard reset, or something else? Believe it or not, the community here wants to help people be able to enjoy using their machines.

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Yeah, doing well mostly. I’m waiting for the 12th gen issues to settle down / iron out…hoping to jump onto that bandwagon before x’mas.

I had that expectation…but I guess my bar didn’t include the fundamentals of power on issues. …and Intel’s silicon bug isn’t helping either (as that requires a battery pull and reset).

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So you’re talking about leaving it powered on in s2idle / modern standby / whatever for 2-3 days unplugged, and having it drain to 0%?

If so, OK, that would roughly match what I see. My s2idle drain is 2-3% per hour. What do other laptops do with this usage profile?

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@Second_Coming - I get the power on issues. It would frustrate the heck out of me if I hit them. I did get the RTC in my second machine to drain after letting it sit for several weeks. Fortunately it didn’t get stuck so I did not need to pop out the RTC battery. It makes me nervous every time that I do it. That’s a design change that I would like to see, a less fragile RTC holder.

I thought about upgrading to a 12th gen board but likely will sit tight and see what comes out in the next couple of generations. For now my 11th gen is working well for me, knock on wood.

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