I’ve seen a lot of posts here about people having trouble with their laptop freezing (1, 2) and most seem to need a motherboard replacement to solve so I thought I’d give my story which was thankfully a bit less costly to fix.
I tried pulling both batteries (main battery + CMOS battery), let that sit for a few minutes but it didn’t solve the problem. Then I tried reseating the RAM and that didn’t work. Then I decided to take it apart and put it under a microscope, both figuratively and literally. Sadly I found that the build quality is substantially sub-par, but I was able to solve my issue.
First I found that there seems to be flux residue around the pins on the RAM connectors. I don’t have a good picture of this as it was through the microscope and I didn’t have a good setup for it. Seems that the flux wasn’t properly cleaned off the board.
Second I found that one of the WiFi coax cables was routed under the RAM and got pinched. I don’t think this was actually the problem, but this does seem like a design defect to not have this properly separated from an area that’s going to get pinched. I put some Kapton tape around this, though I really should go back with heat shrink tubing since the radius is so small.
[Can’t include picture of this because I’m a new user]
Then I found upon taking the thermal management part (fan, heat block, heat pipes, heat sink) out that a full 30% of the top of the CPU die wasn’t properly thermal pasted.
Finally, what I think is the culprit. This is a picture of the bottom side of the thermal block. This is after I’ve put some Kapton tape over the spot, but you can see where either some of the copper has rubbed off, or some material (which I think would be solder) has rubbed on. As shown, I added some Kapton tape on that area and around it and reinstalled it. I suspect this is the problem because, in hindsight, I do remember most if not all of the crashes before it stopped booting seemed to correlate with my use of the keyboard (something I wish I’d have thought of sooner).
If you’re mechanically competent and have been having any issues with your Framework laptop I’d suggest you disassemble it and check the thermal management part. If it looks like this, put a good quality (won’t tear) insulator between it and the motherboard.
In my case, my laptop went from wouldn’t even get to the Framework logo to boots and doesn’t freeze at all with these changes. Overall I’m rather disappointed with Framework’s quality, but thankful that at least nothing seems to have been burnt up.