I have sent a ticket (#6367) to Purism but since they’re experiencing an email backlog I thought I’d come here to ask for support.
My Librem 15 V4 laptop suddenly turned off and no longer turns back on or charges (no light indication).
I have taken out the battery and then put it back in. No changes. No signs of damage on the battery.
I used my partners charging cord (he has the same laptop) to make sure it wasn’t a damaged cord but it isn’t. My partner is wary about me taking out his laptops battery and putting it in mine to see if it works due to the possibility of things resetting or doing some damage of some kind on his laptop. What does happen if you take out the battery on a working laptop?
I was under the impression that the laptop could continue to be powered even without a battery, am I mistaken about this? If not, what other causes could this possibly be and should I take it into a local computer repair shop?
The laptop is about four and a half years old.
Should I purchase a new battery? I am from Australia so I would have to consider getting one outside of the Purism brand. Not really sure where to start if so. I guess I could look at the specs on the battery and go from there?
Assuming your AC charger (with barrel connector) is fine, your laptop should be able boot without any battery at all. Have you tried removing your battery and running off the AC charger only???
A concern about taking out the battery of a working laptop (my partners non-broken one) is data loss or some kind of factory reset. Nothing major, especially if everything is back upped before taking out the battery. Just wanted to see if anyone has already done so and what were the results, if any.
As for battery replacement, I would only purchase one if it was likely that it was the issue though it doesn’t seem to be isolated to such given that the computer won’t run on AC power. Seems like another issue may be going on.
I agree. It seems to be an issue outside of the battery so a new one doesn’t seem to be the solution.
As for powering down, the laptops already dead so no need of shutting it down but I’ll definitely keep it unplugged when taking out/inserting the battery. Thanks for the safety advice.
For boot firmware, are you using Pureboot to verify boot integrity with a Librem Key or are you using Coreboot? (I understand that you and your partner might have made different choices so in that case you should answer for each.)
I have no idea whether the particular laptop model has a button cell to maintain the time. If not then the worst that can happen if you remove the battery is that the time is lost (the laptop boots up not knowing the time). While that can be unwelcome and messy, it isn’t the end of the world - but you should verify the time as soon as practicable after boot and if the time is wrong then fix it before proceeding with general use.
Traditionally, computers lose their CMOS settings if the button cell is removed (i.e. all battery power while switched off is unavailable) i.e. in addition to losing the time and, again, that is unwelcome and messy but not the end of the world. However I’m not sure that there are CMOS settings on that laptop model.
Bear in mind that every laptop has to be able to survive that the battery accidentally goes completely flat and every laptop battery will eventually die and need to be replaced which means it has to be possible to remove the battery without ill-effect.
(It is true that some laptops will shut down if only a small percentage of charge remains so that the time can be maintained while switched off. However it is still always possible that the battery goes completely flat.)
I understand that your partner wants to be cautious. In that case an obvious question is: besides the two laptops, do you have any other computers?
@Scarlett I can also confirm that you don’t need the main battery in order to power on the laptop: it only needs AC plugged in. It would be a waste of money to buy a new battery at this point - it surely can’t be a dead or low battery causing this issue.
I must say, unfortunately, that I am not too optimistic about the way you describe how it happened - that it suddenly went dead and no way to power it back on again. In fact, what you describe has happened to me already once, but I was fortunate to have access to another (working) Librem15/v4 so I could do extensive troubleshooting (swaping boards or other components) - and this resulted in the worst case diagnosis: motherboard toast!
Eventually, I could repair it, because I was able to get the part (whole MBD) from Purism Support, and it was not even so expensive.
But disassembling the entire laptop in order to swap MBDs and putting it back together is NOT an easy thing to do. I think a more reasonable way to go is to get an RMA from Support and ship it back to them for troubleshooting and then give you an estimate.