11th Gen Laptop with weird wake up issues - Buyers beware

I am running Windows 11 with the fancy modern sleep/fast awake disabled. Laptop takes a good few seconds to wake up from sleep, which I don’t mind.

It is not the main battery issue I am talking about.

@Sumit - thanks for the replies. I see the battery on Amazon (quick check, didn’t look elsewhere) in the US. If you’re not in the US you may have different options. You might also see if Support will send you a replacement RTC battery.

After a full charge, you shouldn’t have your machine not power on after a couple of days off of power. That’s neither expected nor acceptable, it certainly should last more than a couple of days since a full charge. If you’re in the same boat after swapping the RTC battery your main board may have an issue and in that case, one would expect replacement of the board to be covered under warranty. Good luck.

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Yeah, US has all the good stuff (and tempted to get political, but will refrain) :rofl:.

I am in the UK. Looks like they aren’t popular as coin cells here! I’ve got some specific laptop replacement batteries on Amazon. So I got one from eBay :crossed_fingers:t4:

Hopefully the one from ebay works out for you. The politics here are a mess. Hopefully they get better but I’m concerned that we’ve entered a new (even more dysfunctional) normal.

I have updated my previous answer with this bit, hopefully that clarifies

Eventually when it does, the laptop boots up and shows anything between 50-75% battery left (my battery charging is capped at 80%).

Long story short main battery good/ bios battery bad :see_no_evil:

As noted by folks in the thread:

  1. A fully charged RTC battery should last weeks, not days. If it is lasting for days, that means it was either not fully charged, there is an issue with the RTC battery, or something else is happening with the Mainboard. If you leave your laptop plugged in for 48 hours to let the RTC battery fully charge, and it goes into a non-bootable state within a few days after that, reach out to Support. We’ll get you a new RTC battery and/or a new Mainboard, depending on what the symptoms are and what steps you have taken thus far.
  2. We have shared detail on the root cause of this in Viability of an ML 1220 rechargable battery for RTC | CMOS - #43 by nrp
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Maybe it’s time that #43 response gets turned into some kind of a tech note on Kustomer. (If it’s not already there) Seems official enough…as I think that’s what nrp is implying with repeated reference to it have been made by him and Framework support. i.e. There seems to be nothing more Framework will add to the matter. (Pretty ‘static’ since June 15th 2022)

Thanks @nrp I’ll do that and report back.

Question though, if that’s the official response then why are people getting support responses to reset motherboard and continue? @Second_Coming @nmiles have you been offered rtc battery/motherboard replacement? Has that helped?

My support response has a weird one.

  • After 24hrs of charging, please carefully remove the RTC battery out for at least 15 minutes. This allows the battery to recover some of its charges.

Anyway, I shall do as instructed next weekend. I’ll leave the laptop plugged in until I get my new RTC battery.

Yes that may have been a mistake.

  • Remove the battery to allow it to recover
  • Do the main board reset
  • Charge for 24hour initially and around 9 hours a week

Further failures indicate a duff ML 1220 or poor connection to it so it isn’t charging as designed.

I just realised the laptop has now charged to 100% which means yesterday the RTC battery did conclusively die out and reset the BIOS settings. I had my Battery set to charge upto 80% via BIOS, sigh!

Well, 24 hours in, another 24 to go, before I am allowed to ‘disconnect’ it.

My new pattern of usage over the last week has been use plugged in for 16 hours and unplug while going to sleep. Looks like that may have contributed to the RTC dying as well. We shall see when I restart the test tomorrow night.

@amoun I have no reason to do a mainboard reset if the laptop comes back up on its own after the RTC battery has recharged enough. I am losing track of workarounds needed now :stuck_out_tongue:

Where does this 9 hours a week from from? Official or some poor user, reverse engineered it? Eitherway it doesn’t apply to my use case. It most certainly stays on power for > 9 hours a week. And yet it’s died at random times!

Does anyone dare speculate if stopping main battery charge at 80% affects RTC battery from getting charged 100%? If so, that’s a bloody rock and hard place!

At ~9 quids a pop and a 3 monthly RTC battery refresh cycle, this will be a high-maintenance laptop :smiley: :smiley: :D…

Hi there. Very anoying issue apparentely. Just my 2cts from a happy 12 th gen user.
While reading this thread…I was thinking I am lucky to not ha e this kind of trouble…also at the very same time I realise that it never happened to me in one month to have my laptop unplugged for 3 days.
So of cours will be very unhappy if it arrives…but it s unlikely for mee

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I wrote about this battery issue quite a bit a few months ago. I’ve decided to just live with it. :expressionless:

However, would I buy another Framework? Probably not after 6 months of ownership.

Mainly it’s too fragile feeling. I’m careful with my gear but this…a bit too delicate for mobile use IMO.

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@Jason_Dagless when you say “Live with it” do you have to reset m/b often or do you just plug it in and wait for it to come back? Did you try to replace the RTC battery?

Yes, it feels a bit fragile, but I should be able to unplug it and take it to my sofa to surf something after work or do other mundane things without being tied to my office desk. Once a year, I should be able to travel to work location and know that when I fish it out of my bag, it will work in the conference room before a presentation!

Current status reminds me of some Dell Latitudes we had back in around 2008. They would get plugged into a docking-station that was on your work desk connected to the monitors and keyboards, and the expectation was, when you had to go to a meeting you would take it off the docking station and walk to you meeting, except, it would reboot Windows everyime you either docked or undocked :rofl: :man_facepalming:t4: That experience scarred me from ever buying Dells for myself :smiley:

Well I use my workstation 90% of the time. I use my laptop on occasion for doing jobs away from home or holidays etc. so it can sit in my bag doing nothing for 2-3 weeks or more. I hadn’t used it for just 5 or 6 days and the thing refused to boot, charging didn’t work, so i did the BIOS battery pop out and that got it working again.

That’s when I found out, that unlike every other laptop I’ve used since 1996, if you want the darn thing to work when you want it to work you have to keep on using it.

So I now have a laptop that I have to constantly keep an eye on and pre-plan if I want to use it at any time. Not really a case of ‘grab and go’.

And those that use their laptop every day need not chime in. This does not concern you and your usage case. :wink:

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Thanks for that. I am also prepping to live with it! I have added a Windows battery status to my main post, as you can see it was kept plugged in for the basic ‘minimum’ 8 hours a week and more, but still died unexpectedly. I am hoping an RTC battery change will fix it until the 100 cycles of the RTC is over (which I guess would be 3 months or thereabouts). So instead of replacing a CR2032 every 6 weeks we are replacing an ML whatever, every 9-12 weeks. Meh! Atleast CR2032s are easy to obtain and cheap as chips!

It is my daily driver, I am still to find a predictable pattern, hopefully I will! Until then banking on work-from-home to carry me through and arrive 15 minutes early for any meetings just in case :joy:

I have one framework that I use daily and another family machine that is used rarely. I keep the rarely used machine plugged in but with a charge limit set in the bios. That allows it to be grab and go for me. I understand that for various reasons one may not wish to or be able to leave the laptop plugged in, but that’s what has worked in my case.

Have a good day.

So, “what works for you” is having two Framework laptops! Thanks for that :stuck_out_tongue:

Ha. I wish that it were used more heavily but the others in my family are Apple users whom I thus far have been unsuccessful at convincing even to try linux. So, the second machine is less used than I had hoped it would be. It does provide for me a convenient platform on which to try things out, but that wasn’t my intention when I bought it.

To be completely clear for anyone reading this thread (not looking at you @Sumit or you @Jason_Dagless, rather, noting it for anyone who skims through the thread quickly), the second machine is a “nice to have,” I don’t need it to be able to use the laptop. My use case typically has my primary machine on power most times, so I have avoided the RTC issues that others have encountered.

Be well.

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I have not been offered a replacement battery or mainboard, though I may just link this thread with nrp’s response lol. I’m giving it a couple days after the latest mainboard reset I did per Framework support’s recommendation just to see how long it takes for the battery to die.

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Ugh. My laptop just did this. Powered on 2 days ago, fully charged at 80%. Powered off.

Powered back on this afternoon. Laptop wouldn’t power on. Plugged into USB C power, laptop immediately came on. 78% battery :expressionless:

BIOS 3.10, ArchLinux