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

Leave it in your bag for a month or a couple of weeks. It will have an issue most likely. All 11th gen have the flaw. It’s built in. A rechargeable CMOS battery was a bad choice for this chipset.

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We will never really know. But a lot of other laptops have them…

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Depends. There appears to be two issues in play here. I’ll take mine as an example:

First board: is fine for about a week away from wall power, then reaches the completely unbootable state that requires mainboard reset process. Things attempted under guidance from Support: long charge cycles (twice), reset (had already done so), BIOS update (no effect), switch to officially supported Linux distro (no change). Eventually, after all this troubleshooting (and asking for and receiving some pictures of the coin battery holder), they issued a replacement board.

Second board: becomes unbootable after 1h away from wall power, but will boot if power is supplied from the wall. Do the whole dance again (+ try Bios 3.17) and as of now they’re going to replace that replacement board after looking at pictures of the coin battery holder.

So the second board may or may not have the “unbootable state” issue, but both times it seems like they find SOMETHING in the pictures of the battery holder that makes them classify the mainboard as physically defective and in need of replacement. (Perhaps they should lead with that request for pictures, because at least in my case that seems to be where the diagnosis was made. Would have saved many weeks of troubleshooting. :stuck_out_tongue: )

Basically: yes, all 11th gen board probably have the same underlying flaw, but it does seem like there is also an issue with the coin holder that may be making the issue worse for some boards than others.

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I’ve left my laptop for 2 weeks and even 2 months and its never failed to turn on, and usually only discharges about 4%

Yes, but that’s my point. So you might have one board with a “good” coin holder - issue takes many weeks to manifest (if at all). Bad coin holder - issue takes hours or days to manifest. This would fit with their statement that some boards seem more affected than others.

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Recall then? Surely that’s the right thing to do? Send out properly tested and approved boards to those affected. Minimum 6 weeks unplugged to power on.

See…another solution. I can wait.

“But you can’t expect Framework…” Hold on, this the company that said ‘NO!’ to Can’t isn’t it?

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Personal suspicion? They looked at the possibility but ran the numbers and saw that it would drive them straight into Chapter 11. After all, this is something that at least in theory affects almost all laptops they’ve sold so far. So then they might be better off (as a company) to replace on an as-needed basis, especially now that the 11th gen boards are being phased out.

Not exactly the “optimal”, but a bankrupt FW would have even more trouble supporting us. (If only the dance with Support didn’t take so long…)

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It’s a tough call indeed.

Looking down at my Framework on charge after its fifth ‘fail to boot from my bag’ routine since I’ve had it.

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Sure it is but is it realistic? Not even remotely. That would sink the company. The best they can do realistically is keep replacing the boards that fail as the claims come in. Some boards act better than others with no way to know which is which at the start. That’s how it looks to me anyways.

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How about 30% discount on any 12th Gen or 13th Gen board? :thinking:

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That would be a better solution for affected customers but while it wouldn’t necessarily bankrupt the company flat out, it leads to a different problem, namely cash flow. Given that most of the install base is still 11th gen, that means that you essentially need to discount the boards to what is likely a loss for FW. The losses would again likely sink the company, just slower than option A.

Replacing boards as needed is still the cheapest option FW can implement and might even be able to write off the failures as a loss for taxes, idk. It isn’t pretty and they shouldn’t be giving this much hassle to customers but it is the strategy they are going with. As for the ethical concerns about informing customers…what would be the point now? This is primarily a problem with 11th gen boards, which are now EOL, except for refurbs and stock of boards on the marketplace, no new 11th gen laptops will be produced so no new customers will be affected. The pool of affected users is around zenith I would imagine and can be slowly shrunk as boards get replaced.

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The workaround is fairly straightforward. People may not like it, but it is an option, and it works (defective boards excluded, obviously). The workaround that I follow with my very rarely used second machine is to set a charging limit and leave it plugged in. I haven’t had an issue with it failing to boot when I have followed that process. I did leave it for roughly three weeks without plugging it in to see how long it would go before the RTC battery discharged and it wouldn’t boot. But leaving it plugged in has allowed me to dodge the issue on that machine for now.

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I think the potential buyers of those remaining 11th gen boards deserve the truth straight from the horse’s mouth, for sure.

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7 posts were split to a new topic: Warranty Claim

@Kamil_Hanus based on my reading of the thread, you essentially dropped a bomb on the process the second you threatened legal action. At this point anyone from Framework seeing this, and any support ticket you might have are now getting filtered through legal counsel.

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As my comments are getting out of scope this topic, I will create separate one.

I do believe some of you guys will welcome that. As I am really frustrated from situation, I will provide full email communication with anonymized personal data. There is chance I personally miss something, however I still believe that my requests are legitimate.

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2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Warranty Claim

Haven’t been engaged in this discussion for a while but have been checking in to read the lively banter all along.

I do think it’s a good point to repeat for those that are new to the topic and didn’t read all the way thru from the top that this forum attracts the people who have this problem so please be careful to assume that the sentiments expressed here are widespread. The =silent majority= have no problem at all.

I use my laptop very infrequently and have =never= had a problem. Earlier in this conversation I monitored my use and went something like 4 weeks, short power on, another 4 weeks and short power on, then 12 weeks where it wouldn’t power on. In that case it powered on when I plugged it in … and I’m not sure whether that was RTC battery or main battery (which was @ 20% when I checked it a short while later.)

Not mentioning this to brag – if you have the problem you should work with FW to get a replacement … the case where the replacement was worse than the 1st is certainly a crappy data-point but it doesn’t change the fact that most motherboards are working fine and some are definitely better than others.

My experience with FW is certainly that they care about the problems - YMMV, of course - and hopefully with time and patience they can resolve your problem.

Good luck everyone!

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One week later, is your Framework still behaving properly with the new CMOS battery? I just installed mine this morning and let it charge for 8 hours. I then shut off the laptop, let it sit for 10 minutes, and then turned it back on. Incredibly, it booted. :slight_smile:

I know that’s such a low bar, but even that was impossible with my old coin battery. I can’t believe support doesn’t suggest to replace this battery, or even sell it in their market place. It’s such an obvious, low-effort thing to try in comparison to the never ending ridiculous tests they’re still asking for me to perform.

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I think their goal is to prevent this issue from happening in the future, not to find a quick and limited workaround.