If you can’t afford a new laptop, do not attempt this without practicing first, until you gain confidence.
And you must practice with small SMD (surface mounted) components. Too much heat or leave the iron in place too long, and you can melt the solder on the other end of the capacitors. Then they will move, either bridging contacts (shorting contacts) or sliding right off. This is why you do not want an iron without accurate temperature control, it’s more forgiving when you don’t have much experience. A good iron, quality flux, quality solder.
I want to eventually apply this fix to two 11th gen laptops. My intended approach is to find an electronics repair business close-ish to where I live that’s willing to take this on, since my most recent soldering iron experience dates back to the 1980s.
If that goes ahead I plan on posting their info here in case others may benefit. Probably on a new thread.
Just got my RTC Substitute in the mail today. Fitted it in, soldered the wire. Didn’t burn the house down. Laptop didn’t burst into flame upon power on. It went through a memory test process as you would expect. Think it went well.
Now, for some reason, I received two RTC Substitute in two separate envelopes. I only need one. It’s probably cheaper and wastes less energy if someone in my hood needs the other one. PM me if you’re somewhere along a SkyTrain line.
Silly question, but does the mainboard have to be removed to get a photo of the serial number? Just curious how much time to allot myself when I go to get the information needed to submit a support ticket to get this battery elimination solution.
I wonder if he found out that his “fix” of the battery holder by soldering the substitute board in didn’t work because it wasn’t making connection with the contact on the side? I mean, he soldered the board to one of the contacts, but there is a second contact on the side of the holder that didn’t snap off. I was wondering if the little battery replacement board wasn’t making contact with it.
Also, he kept calling the board a “battery,” but that’s a simple enough mistake. I wonder if he’ll make a follow-up or anything.
Edit: Honestly, after seeing how he repaired the battery holder, that’s when I updated my previous post and said maybe I’d still make a video of me installing it, lol. Granted, I’ve never even done board level repair and it may go even worse when I attempt it. We’ll see.
Hi All - I just installed mine and it actually wasn’t bad at all - took about 10-15 mins (I was lazy and took the risk so I did it without removing the board and just did it in place). By far the hardest part is putting the thing in the RTC battery holder - it took me multiple tries and each time I was sure I was going to break it. The soldering went well (I have some experience but i’m not used to parts this small) and as far as I can tell all is fine.
I am glad I read all the posts above before I did it.
Hope you all have as easy a time as possible installing it.
I watched Rossmann’s video before he pulled it, and I’ve seen way worse Mickey Mouse bodge jobs than that. I won’t speculate on why it was pulled, but probably for the best so anyone else who manages to wreck their holder doesn’t get any ideas about how to patch it up. Most likely it’ll result in more harm than good for people who don’t have prior rework experience.
For the record, Louis (most likely) broke the holder because he was being impatient and decided to do it without a thin spudger/SIM card eject tool (his own words), so word to the wise: follow the Framework guide, be patient, don’t cut corners.
And please consider paying someone else to do it if you don’t have experience doing board-level repairs on tiny SMD components like these.
Soldering iron thermometer (a fake hakko will do)…calibrate the tip temp
Good light source
A helping hand with magnifier
800-1000 grit sandpaper
The sandpaper…for rounding the edge on the top side of the RTC substitute. OOTB, it’s too square. To me, I noticed tolerance was a tad too tight (with the tape on top of the RTC substitute) with the battery clip. So, by rounding the top side edge, it would mimic the physical profile of the RTC battery slightly better.
Wire direction is identical to how Ian_Thomas has his (but getting around the Gigadevice IC). I didn’t tape the wire to the grey blocks though, but instead, taped it to the board with an inverted T-shaped cutout. Reason for this: The black cover has double sided tape that goes onto the grey blocks. In the future, if I had kapton tape like Ian has, then it’s not deterministic as to which tape would be stickier at the time of lifting up the black cover. i.e. it might try to lift the kapton tape, and pull / agitate the wire with it. (Mind you, the top side of the kapton tape is fairly non-stick…I just tend to worry)
Used one of the jumper (?) / PJ1003 spots to test out the factory solder temperature requirement as well.
