This may be the stupidest question in the history of this forum, but how is the power button supposed to work? Last night my laptop shut down (exhausted battery) so I charged it all night and today I had to hold power for >60 seconds to start it, (after opening/closing the lid a few times). This is not unusual for me, I haven’t found a way to make the laptop consistently power on. Is this normal?
Potentially relevant:
I’m running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. I seldom reboot, so this is not a frequent problem.
When the laptop is running, pressing power the button immediately brings up a “Power Off” dialog, so the button works.
Reading the forums I have seen people complain about the bright backlight on the power button/fingerprint reader. I have never seen a backlight on my power button.
A couple questions that might help others troubleshoot. Which generation Framework do you have. Is your BIOS up-to-date / what BIOS version do you have? BIOS guide
That seems odd. There is at least one LED underneath or embedded in the power button / FPR assembly. There is a translucent diffuser, about 0.5mm, wide that fringes the button top.
When the laptop is…
powered on and not sleeping, a white LED light forms a constant halo around the button top.
sleeping, the LED pulses with a cadence of 1-2 seconds.
If he has never seen a backlight on his power button, then he is either working with a faulty power button, OR he has updated the bios and has turned the LED for the power button off. I think you can do that, but I know you can turn down the brightness of it.
I am thinking I must have a faulty power button. I will check the BIOS first, then attempt to re-seat the button over the weekend to see if I can get it to behave as described.
I am pretty sure I have never updated the BIOS w.r.t. the power button.
I am certain I have never seen it backlit: is the power button backlight supposed to get brighter dimmer at the same rate as keyboard backlight?
Laptop is a “Framework Laptop DIY Edition (12th Gen Intel® Core™)” from Sep 2022 (not sure if that tells me what generation the laptop is as opposed to the CPU).
No. It comes on when the system is powered on and stays on at the same brightness the whole time it is on. When you suspend it will flash slowly to indicate that the laptop is in standby.
Everything else and the light is out, because the laptop is off.
So if you never saw a light around the power button then I think hardware issue is most likely what it is, and you should contact support.
I was already pretty sure the power button was broken based on the responses above and lack of any LED backlight. This weekend the laptop would not turn on at all so I opened it up and:
While the keyboard was removed the power button seemed to work to turn the computer on, but had no backlight still.
When I put it back together power button didn’t work agaib.
So I took it apart again and this time the power button didn’t work…
…until I squeezed it really hard on both sides.
So in conclusion: defective power button, I can only power on the laptop by opening it up so will not be rebooting for the foreseeable future, and will be contacting support.
Thanks all.
PS: if anyone knows a way to power on/off a framework laptop without use of the power button I would love to hear it.
It’s worth repeating though, be very careful when trying to press it. The button is tiny, delicate, and there are small components nearby that can be damaged.
When pressing it, be ready to interrupt boot to get into the bios. Then follow this
That way in the future you can boot without messing with the tiny, delicate motherboard button.
If you can still get your fingerprint button to work at all, use that instead to get into the bios.
so will not be rebooting for the foreseeable future, and will be contacting support.