With these quotes, maybe you can see where the confusion came through.
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If this makes the whole thing happen less frequently, this sounds like a decent workaround to me. If I leave the thing unused for a month now, it’ll be in the bad state anyway. If the battery is empty, too - what have I lost? I need the laptop on a charger for 24h anyway.
I already manage the charging state of the main battery for the laptop anyway, but I can’t even see the charging state of the RTC battery (as far as I know). If the RTC-battery-life would be somewhat tied to the main battery, I just need to keep managing the main battery and top that of every few weeks - and I can check the state of the main battery, so I have feedback from the system. Currently, I have a laptop that works fine yesterday evening at 90% main battery, and today it’s dead without any warning. That is very annoying.
Alternatively, give us an option for this reset that does not involve fiddling with a fragile battery holder and a fragile main battery connector, that would be fine, too. Press the power button for 45sec with the AC adapter, or something, whatever.
I like this idea…but not sure if it poses any security related risk / issue.
(e.g. In the case of a password protected BIOS…anyone with physical access can reset your board with the power button…and no password needed?) A matter of able to reset with 45seconds physical access, vs 90 seconds (unscrew / pull / put back / screw)…
I’m not exactly clear on what information is stored by the use of RTC battery other than time, vs what’s in the NVRAM.
Didn’t occur to me at all - that might be a problem, I agree.
Just chiming in to say this just happened to me, again. Laptop wouldn’t power on until connected to a charger, then went through a lengthy boot process, and Windows had forgotten the time (it was two weeks in the past). As a result a lot of web services wouldn’t work presumably because of certificate security issues, until I corrected the time manually.
I cannot recommend the Framework laptop to anyone until this issue is resolved in some way. I suppose I should be thankful I haven’t yet had to do the full mainboard reset routine and interfere with the fragile CMOS battery holder.
You’re lucky…for now.
Happened to @Christopher_Yarch today:
Laptop Fails to Turn On - Community Support - Framework Community
My laptop wouldn’t boot at all, even when connected to charger.
In the time ive had it, it only happened twice, and I suspect it was due to a Microshaft Winblows 10/11 update because both occurrences (for me anyways) happened when updates were scheduled and in progress.
Wanted to add to this thread by saying I’ve also started seeing this issue. I had a flight yesterday and the laptop wouldn’t power on despite fully charging the battery before leaving. Remembering this thread I tried plugging it into one of the USB outlets in the seat, and doing that for just a couple of seconds was enough to get it to power on, and the main battery was fully charged as expected. The same thing’s been happening since then, though I haven’t had a chance to leave the laptop charging for a significant amount of time yet.
The last few months were the first time in this laptop’s life where I’ve used it almost exclusively plugged in with a 60% charge limit, so I’m wondering if that could have anything to do with this issue. It’s also possible that the fact I wasn’t using it unplugged hid the problem rather than caused it, but it’s something worth considering I think.
For now I’ll try leaving it plugged in for a long time and see if that helps. In regular usage it’s easy enough to work around by just increasing the Windows sleep-to-hibernate battery threshold to a large enough value such that the laptop doesn’t actually ever turn off, but an actual resolution would be nice since this has a significant effect on battery life.
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What’s the word on this being an issue on the new 12th gen models? I see this topic pop up too much on the forums to not ask.
No report seen in the forum yet. No news is good news.
Already addressed in post 43.
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For a summary of that post relevant to @Firestorm980’s question, they planned to reduce the power draw on the RTC battery, and implemented a bandage solution of a clear CMOS button to address potential silicon bugs requiring a full mainboard reset. The RTC battery would theoretically last 2 months after 24 hours on the charger with the proposed changes.
EDIT:
They also added a path to charge the RTC battery from the main battery, so it should stay charged as long as the laptop battery has charge, so no real worry if it works as proposed.
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The relevant section of nrp’s post is quoted in my previous reply?
I’ve given up on the issue myself. As power costs have shot up I’ve now switched to using my Framework hooked to a Dell Dock as my daily general machine rather than my X99 chipset workstation.
One runs on around 8 watts and the other runs at 100W+ no brainer really.
…and I said this in another thread:
We’re in the desktop replacement laptop market…we just didn’t know about it.
Yeah I even downclocked my other half’s PC with a FX8350 in it to 2GHz. She hasnt noticed…
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Update on this:
Leaving the laptop charging for 24+ hours at 100% main battery charge didn’t help, so I tried opening it up and inspecting the RTC battery immediately after the laptop failed to power on in this way. I was measuring an OCV of a little over 2.5 V, which indicated that it was probably not completely discharged as per @amoun’s post here:
On closer inspection there seemed to be some corrosion on both the cell itself and the negative terminals of the holder on the mainboard like in the picture below (you can’t actually see it super well because in my infinite wisdom I took a picture of brown corrosion against a brown wooden table, but it’s there on the bottom right side):
So I just wiped off both the cell and the holder with some isopropyl alcohol and reinstalled the cell. That was two days ago, and I haven’t had the problem occur since even after longer periods of shutdown than before. It looks like in my case at least the issue was caused by a poor connection to the battery, so if someone else has symptoms this extreme it might be worth trying to just clean and reinsert the RTC battery to see if that fixes it.
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Well, I didn’t spend quite that much on the laptop since I don’t use it as my daily driver (evidently) but I did need a portable device for occasional use. Though the value of that is diminished due to this particular issue…
Great that it seems like the issue should be mostly resolved on the 12th gen. boards. Unfortunately I don’t see how any solution could be implemented for the 11th gen. boards unless the BIOS can somehow be patched to route power from the main battery to the CMOS battery - though I’m not sure how that could be effected while the system is powered off or in standby and of course is impossible if the board circuitry isn’t in place. It seems to me to be a solely hardware issue.
Excellent! Look forward to hearing more about it when the time is right and hope that Framework take it seriously if it looks feasible.
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Adding my own experience / solution, I was unable to get the RTC battery to recharge even after following the reset tutorial. I decided I would try getting a replacement RTC battery before contacting framework and found that it worked. They are cheap on amazon, hoping this might help someone else out.
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