Booting The Framework 13 With A Depleted Battery?

Hello all,

My mother-in-law has a Framework 13 with an Intel 13th gen processor. She splits her time between two homes, and leaves the Framework in one of them, and therefore she often returns to her Framework’s battery depleted.

Her home is very rural, and she has credible concern about electrical fires when she’s not present, so she does not leave it plugged in.

I have suggested to her that she completely shut down the machine when she leaves.

Two questions:

  1. In the case where she does not choose to shut down the laptop, is there a setting or configuration that can reduce or eliminate the standby drain?
  2. When she goes to turn it on and the battery is dead, it takes 20-30 minutes of USB-C charging (She has a 140W USB-C charger that seems to output ~25W to the Framework) before she is able to turn it on. Is there a way to quicken this process?

Thanks!

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Welcome to the community @sturmen!

The best way for her to leave the machine is to enable the “Hibernation” option that is turned off by default in Windows 11. Google a few guides on how to enable it.

Then, I would change the behavior of the Power Button and Closing the Lid to Hibernate. This should solve most of her issues and she can just close the lid when she is done working.

If the battery is flat dead; it takes a while for it to get a base charge before the embedded controller (EC) will allow the machine to fully turn on. Part of this is a failsafe in the battery charge controller and EC so that there is more than enough energy to bring itself online and not faceplant when it barely has enough charge.

Otherwise, there is a risk later in the devices life that it could get into an endless loop of charging a little, trying to start, killing off whatever little charge it had, then shutting down unexpectedly. Do that enough times and corruption starts happening in the Operating system and possibly the EC.

Let us know how it turns out and thanks for supporting those who appreciate the extra technical support from family!

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