James,
Well, this senior is about to attempt to solder this battery replacement tomorrow. Wish my 76 year old hands luck, as I have never soldered anything before. Got an estimate here in NYC at 100 from a kid and 160 from a shop (the latter did not provide a guarantee, so why would I use them?)
You got this, Nicholas!
Please please please don’t make it your very first solder. Find a bunch of junk electronics in your closet or at a thrift shop and practice on them -a lot- before you risk your very-valuable board. Make sure you watch a few videos so you know what good technique is and make sure that you’re using the right iron tip, solder, flux and wire for the job.
Good luck and let us know how it goes!
When you said that you can’t afford a new laptop, did you mean that you can’t afford a new mainboard?
If so, it’s a very bad idea to make this your first attempt at soldering surface mounted components. In my opinion.
Hi, I agree with the others, please do practice on something else, maybe you have a broken bit of electronics somewhere you can use? And watch some youtube soldering videos.
I found that getting the thing in the holder was hard, I eventually put one side in and as I pushed down on the other I lifted the tiny plastic lug up a mm or so to get it to go in. I backed off multiple times as it seemed close to breaking.
Soldering, clean before and after with isopropyl alcohol. That helps solder flow and flux do its part, and with the right temp it only takes 2 seconds to make the join.
Tl:dr try and find a friend or relative to do it, or if you have to go it alone do a lot of practice first.
Good luck!
Are there any technical differences between the original fix (two resistors & Schottky Diode) and the fake coin cell?
I believe the original solution allowed the RTC battery to charge from the laptop battery, rather than only from charger power via the USB-C power input. This would prevent the RTC battery from dying when the computer was left unplugged for an extended period of time.
The new battery substitute module gets rid of the coin cell all together and simply powers the RTC circuit directly from the laptop’s battery. This means the RTC will reset any time the laptop battery is disconnected/removed, but it also means there is no RTC battery to fail and it’s an easier fix.
Thanks. I’ll stay with the original solution then, just for the tiny advantage of not having to reset the clock. 
Technically, your OS should auto-correct the clock as soon as you connect to the internet, but hey, and advantage is an advantage, lol. If you already performed the original fix, I certainly wouldn’t bother with the battery substitute board.
Yup. I even do the overkill and run chrony on a consumer laptop…
And don’t discount lazyness – I’d have to work to undo the fix!!!
With the RTC Substitute solution, if the main battery is really dead / really low voltage / disconnected, then it’s essentially a mainboard reset. You immediately lose BIOS password, date / time, boot order, memory training…etc. (Yes, this board will not retain BIOS admin password on a mainboard reset)
But I can live with that.
With the first solution, if your main battery is really dead / really low voltage / disconnected, you would still have a 3-4 weeks ‘grace’ period before the mainboard is reset…assuming the RTC battery is in good shape.
So, it’s a matter of grace period vs ease of DIY repair.
Once again, please keep this thread on-topic to discussing the available rework options and asking/answering questions about them. Off-topic messages have been removed.
As I don’t see my latest post, I can easily assume you have removed it. So, in short, shorted the mainboard. In other words fried it. Ah well, lesson learned.
MJ1
Good advice. Too late, fried the sucker.
Finally installed it today. To be honest for me it was more difficult than the UltraHDMI mod I installed on my N64… The wire just didn’t want to stick. I can highly recommend magnifying glasses as well.
Everything worked well except for the PTM7950 installation. I gave up after three tries (yes, I put it in the freezer) and just installed MX4 paste.
Didn’t stick to what? Generally I’d approach it like this:
If it didn’t stick to the capacitors, you probably missed at least one of the steps between 1 and 5.
To the solder. I’m not used to stranded wire. At least that’s what I think caused my issues. I could not get a blob of solder on the wire somehow.
But I got there in the end.
To be fair, the wire Framework uses seems to be pretty terrible. I’d have replaced it with solid core enamel wire, like it is used in inductors.
I have also come around to installing my RTC substitute module today and found it pretty easy.
The most nerve wracking part was finagling the module into the RTC battery holder, as it seems to be about 0.5mm or so too thick and the holder is very fragile.
The laptop booted right afterwards and everything is fine.
I did not, however, remove the mainboard from the notebook and just did it in-place. I don’t endorse doing it this way, but for me it worked just fine.
Yeah, I left the mainboard in place too. I fully removed the battery, but left the mainboard in place. I made a video and it’s uploading now. I will post it here when it’s done.