Viability of an ML 1220 rechargable battery for RTC | CMOS (11th gen)

Yeah its sad but that’s how it goes. I wasn’t to know the design of 11th Gen was flawed for those of us that use a full PC for our daily driver.

Does go to show that proper hardware testing with regards to as larger usage group is essential.

Yeah I don’t have the soldering skills. If it clips on, fine.

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Fingers crossed then! :slightly_smiling_face:

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@Jason_Lefkowitz Hi Jason, sorry for your trials with your Framework laptop. As someone who has actually gotten his Framework laptops’ motherboard replaced, I can point you in the direction of “efforts needed”. Refer to my post here. Unfortunately it was a long and verbose process that took almost month of data collection as proof of issue.

TLDR;

  • Charge laptop for 48 hours
  • Un plug
  • Leave overnight
  • Try to start without plugging in next day morning. Repeat… If it doesn’t work reliably, you have a issue with the board.
    (Take battery status screenshots and video of system not booting up on power button press)

If you have to leave it unplugged longer than 21 days, that’s a valid use case, but Framework laptop is not built for that :frowning: They will not acknowledge it beyond this thread. Draw whatever conclusions you want from that.

If your laptop is dying before that, it could be either battery or motherboard or both. I managed to prove it wasn’t battery, (by chance).

Framework support can be iffy, specially their first line of support. After a couple of emails I just told them - look I have given everything you need in the above thread, either tell me what more you need or I’ll assume you don’t want to deal with this issue. That bumped me up to second line, who actually cared to go through all the stuff I posted. Things were very smooth there onwards.

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I gave you a link right in the post. It points to a post right here in this thread! What more do you want?

  1. Since March of last year.

  2. Within weeks of purchase.

  3. I would daresay very few weeks have passed where it’s been plugged in 7 hours a week, since, as I already mentioned, it was purchased for light, infrequent use.

Please note that Framework never said anything at the point of purchase about the device being unfit for infrequent use.

  1. Per Framework Support’s instructions, I have on multiple occasions left the device plugged in for long periods. They used to tell me to do it for 24 hours, so I did that. Now it seems like the word is 72 hours, so I’ve done that. In all cases this brings the device back to bootable status… for a while. Then it croaks again.

  2. Framework Support linked me to this thread, but still did not offer me a replacement ML1220. I had to directly say to them “are you waiting for me to officially request a replacement, because I’m officially requesting one” for them to actually offer me one.

If the product requires a minimum of 7 hours a week of constant charging to be usable, then it is defective. No other laptop on the market requires that.

If the product is defective, but that defect has been worked out in subsequent production units (which seems to be the case, from Framework’s statements), what they could “reasonably do” is recall the affected units and replace them with later-production units that do not have the defect.

They are not doing this, and if this conversation is any indication, they never will. Because why bother, if your customers don’t care?

All I can tell you is: I took a chance on Framework, and they have made me regret it. They sold me a lemon, and when I tell them that, they just ask me why I don’t like the taste of lemonade.

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Rework Instructions for 11th Gen Mainboards to enable RTC Battery charging from the main battery

Alternatively give us a really good discount on a 12th/13th Gen board? I mean a really good one. :thinking:

I’m serious. :slightly_smiling_face:

Unfortunately that is not an available option.

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But maybe the ethical option? :thinking:

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Even if I had an 11th gen board still, I’d pass on this mod. I have little experience with soldering and what little I have seems insufficient to perform this. This is where repair shops in customer areas can prove their worth. Seems to me that mod, while difficult shouldn’t take more than an hour or two. Shouldn’t be too costly to get it fixed then.

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This is where I fall - I’m interested in the modification, but it’s something that I will farm out, as it’s likely beyond my ability to pull off. I have two machines that I may have it done on, depending upon cost.

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This. If anyone in the western half of Oregon is willing to do this mod, I’ll transport my machine to and from, and pay a fair price.

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Maybe ask Louis Rossmann, he’d be certainly able to do such a job easily (and his soldering quality would look much nicer than the example pictures). He also seems to like the Framework and repairability.

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Yes this could be an option as well, you could add a small LDO that is rated for 21V input voltage with a diode on the output as shown in step 6 that is tied to the the main battery power rail.
You can attach it on the top side near the right side image shown above of step 6:

Note: I have not tried this, so cannot confirm it will work.

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Good box for such a tiny lil battery!

Oh there was another box inside that one too! :laughing:

We’ve reached out to our repair center partner in Germany to understand why this packaging was used. Given the battery’s classification, it might have required meatier packaging for protection during shipment, but I don’t know for sure.

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It’s not necessarily that easy:
“If you are a retailer, your customers can ask for redress under the legal guarantee provided by EU law - if an item:
[…]
doesn’t show the quality and performance normal in products of the same type”

Thus, it is quite possible for a product to be considered defective even if there was no specific, exact, claim that is found unsatisfied. But, of course, the big and massive “IANAL” in this one would be: how do we define whether this is, or is not, “normal” in products of the same type? I’d personally lean towards this going against the normal for laptops, though.

But the basic idea is: if you purchase a door knob, and it breaks the moment you twist it a bit hard, the fact that the manufacturer didn’t specifically say that it could withstand that torque does not matter if the “normal” on the market is that door knobs are fine with that. Imagine the girth of the spec sheets we’d need for basically everything we ever purchase otherwise… (Obviously, might be different in other jurisdictions.)

Anyway, for this whole part of the discussion, I’m reasonably satisfied now. My own case is definitely proof that Framework does, at least most of the time, not balk at issuing replacements. (Though something seems to have gone wrong in the situation you were responding to, for sure.) And the new procedure with supplying known good and known compatible RTC batteries when this is needed is plenty enough to make myself satisfied that FW is doing what is reasonably achievable to sort things out. It’s not optimal, but I don’t think there can be an optimal in this situation.

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That made me laugh.

That is not relevant though. FW sells to EU customers under EU regulations, to UK customers under UK regulations, etcetera. Setting all of that up properly was part of the reasons for why it takes time to expand availability to more countries.

The alternative would be for customers to be the importer, in which case the customer would be personally liable for import duties and VAT (like would be the case if ordering from System76 in Denver, for example).

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