PSA: ALWAYS disconnect the battery via BIOS upon opening the chassis

If the battery power is not disconnected part of the mainboard is still energized. This might lead to trouble upon reconnecting things. For example when reconnecting the input cover when the battery is still connected, there’s a high chance that the laptop will boot without touching the power button, an intermittent connecting during connecting the touchpad cable.

I did this mistake because I don’t want to wait for year waiting for the BIOS to do the memory training as the AMD7040 series mainboard does not include the CMOS coin cell. So I swapped SSDs multiple times without disconnecting the battery to save time as I was practicing on dual boot using an SSD for normal working and entertainment and another SSD for learning Linux.

As a result, the connector might be already damaged. I got a volume key not recognized warning right after booting and the laptop failed to charge (attempting to draw 3.7A instead of 2.7A followed by overcurrent protection of the power supply). Fortunately the problem got resolved by shutting down and disconnecting the battery in BIOS, removing and reconnecting the input cover. Unfortunately the key not recognized still appears infrequently about 1 in 50 times.

Conclusion:

  1. Recognize the risk compensation. A highly repairable and upgradeble device might lead to the user into tweaking it more frequently than necessary, negating the reliability of the device. Remember the safety precaution as always.

  2. If you are a Linux newb like me, practice using it in another, older computer to lower the potential cost if anything go wrong. Using well supported OSes like Fedora, Ubuntu and Windows first on this laptop unless you know what you are doing.

  3. Use quality power bricks and/or power banks. Quality power bricks and power banks can recognize the load accurately and cut the power quickly if anything goes wrong. In my case the intermittent connection was causing a current leakage, leading to an extra 1A. In this situation my power bank cut the power while displaying “ICP” my guess would be something like “inrush current protection”. A good quality power supply could recognized the max “expected” load i.e if a device is requesting 20V 1.5A, attempting to draw 20V 2A will trigger an overcurrent shutdown even if the supply is capable of 20V 5A, while a bad quality supply may supply up to 5A if the device is requesting 20V regardless of the current rating of the device.

  4. Some documentations like this one need to be updated to include BIOS battery disconnection.

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