title says it all. i stepped away for a few minutes, came back, and literally watched it croak. i’ve already reached out to support, but i fear i’m out of warranty so i may be boned. i’m not sure how much it took with it. i’m not even sure if this is a cry for help or just to vent. i do have a video of me showing the issue to a friend and you can see smoke coming out of the left side of the board.
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update: the 180 watt charger is also dead. so most likely culprit is a power surge. i do have a second charger on hand i could try testing the mainboard with, but im terrified that this thing will kill anything i plug into it now
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i worked up the courage to plug in a sacrificial power bank and the board showed signs of life! 2 solid white leds on both sides. no response to the power button, but i don’t know how to trigger a power on without it. progress, though!
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Ouch that really sucks. You think it was a power surge? Anything else in your house dead as well and was there a thunder storm recently? I’m terrified of something like this happening as well.
On the bright side, you could buy the new mainboard as a replacement pretty soon.
nothing else is dead in the house, but there has been storms and strange behavior. our ev was acting up this morning and apparently there was something weird with the coffee machine?
signs of life! the laptop doesn’t respond to the power button (it might be dead, i have no way to know), and one of the ram sticks passed memtest in my laptop 12. any ideas?
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You can try holding down the intrusion switch (right below the left ram module) and see if it boots. But I honestly don’t know if it needs all the input modules installed as well for that to work or not.
no dice, i’m not getting fanspin or anything
it somehow managed to get worse. in the process of figuring out if i have any dead expansion cards (and if my charger is actually dead), my framework 12 is also dead. good news is that’s absolutely under warranty, but not great when i need to do college work
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Sorry to hear that. So you’ve had a FW16 and a FW12 die recently due to power supply issues in your home?
yep, pretty much.
What a f***er !!
I have lived in places with poor electricity supply. You might like to investigate / invest in a power protection device such as UPS or surge protector.
Make sure you understand the power issues eg brown outs, surges, frequency spikes etc… and select protection solution accordingly.
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Some PSUs are better than others in respect to resistence to power spikes and lightning strikes.
I would say that it is pretty much impossible to protect from a close lightning strike. The lightning has just jumped a huge gap from a cloud to the ground. It is going to jump pretty much any gap on the ground wiring also. If the electronic equipment is safety related, the mitigation moves to prevention of the lightning strike, and less so, designing a PSU to cope with 100 - 1000 million Volts.
There is equipment you can use now that 100% prevents lightning strikes. The most popular market for it, is ships.
For the home environment, the best you can do is place more power conditioning devices in front of your laptop psu, in the hope that they take the brunt of the spike, just saving the laptop.
The safest home method I have found, is to unplug my laptop from the mains during storms. I also have an external 200AH, 48V battery, that can keep the laptop running for about 48 hours.
Also, if there is a power cut, I unplug the laptop, to avoid the surge when power comes back on.
I have actually been in a house that was hit by a very close, 50meters, lightning strike. UPS etc. Protection did not help at all. All electrical equipment was fried, and wiring in the walls also needed replacement afterwards. Mains plugs became welded into wall sockets. But my laptop survived, as it was not plugged in at the time. Where UPS protection does help, is in the cases where the lightning strike is a little further away than “close”. Without the UPS, the lightning has to be even further away.
some fun trivia, this is not the first time i’ve lost a computer to this house. we’ve never been struck by lightning but something about the quality of power it gets sometimes just fries stuff. all my important stuff is on a ups for this reason, except for the laptops which are by the bed (chronic illness moment)
once the laptops are back in working order im getting a ups for the bed, im not messing around
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I used to deal with minicomputer systems in industrial areas, and we would use a 5KVA transformer as a filter for the various spikes and glitches that would come down the mains from industrial machinery and welding spikes etc. Worked very well, solved lots of problems.
You may find that a large transformer with lots of iron may well be a decent protection against lightening spikes and iffy power. Just remember that a UPS has a heap of electronics that can go bang with mains problems, but may well stop the problem from reaching your conputers.
I don’t think an industrial transformer is something my housemates would appreciate having around, sadly :p. that being said, i don’t really care if the ups survives a power incident. as long as i don’t have a dead machine, i’m happy. i find in my experience that this house is tamed just fine with them.
There are whole house surge protectors as well. I have thought about getting one installed myself as I am in Texas and we get some pretty wild thunder storms. One nearby lightning strike killed a few ethernet adapters and a cheap 8 port switch in my house one time (neighbor got all their led light bulbs killed in that strike).
nature’s wild, man
i’m currently in touch with framework support, they’re trying to troubleshoot because the boards are both showing some signs of life. in case someone’s in the same boat as me, here’s the steps they provided.
For both laptops:
- Try to remove SSD and RAM, then try again to boot.
- Perform a mainboard reset
- For Framework Laptop 16
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Plug in the system to AC.
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Remove the Input modules.
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Press the SW3 switch in the lower part of the RAM slot (encircled in yellow), you must press it slowly, so press for 2 seconds. Release, wait for the red blink on the Mainboard LEDs. repeat.
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Press the power button to boot the system
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BIOS settings will be reset to defaults.
- For the Framework Laptop 12
so, it’s been a while and i have an update. after quite a bit of back and forth, framework has rma’d both laptops, i got word today that both the boards need to be replaced (along with a smorgasbord of other parts)
i’ve since gotten a proper surge protector and battery backup ready for when i get the laptops back, so hopefully this won’t happen again.