Switch 7 Black Edition won't power on

ecloud

I was working on battery and was down to a few percent left, so I closed the keyboard cover to put it to sleep and put it back in my bag.  An hour or so later, at work, I found that it wouldn't wake up, but wasn't surprised and started charging the battery.  At that point the power button LED was flashing amber (presumably to tell me it was very low, but charging).  After it charged a few minutes, I tried again, hoping that it could run and charge at the same time; then it started flashing alternating blue and amber.  I unplugged it, held the switch for a few seconds to get it to power off completely, and resumed charging.  Eventually it got fully charged, apparently (LED not lit anymore at all).  I still can't get it to power on though.  Each time I try, the LED flashes blue, slowly (on 3 seconds, off 3 seconds).  I can hold the button for a few seconds to make it stop, and try again... same thing.  So I had a chat with support.  They had me hold the power button for more than 30 seconds to do a harder reset, I guess.  That doesn't help either.  The blue LED flashing slowly is the only sign of life when I try again to power on: the screen is black, the keyboard backlighting is black, not even any transient flashes of light anywhere except the power LED.

Anybody have any more ideas before I have to send it in?  It's inconvenient and I'm not really keen on losing the work I had in progress on that machine.  I just got it at the end of October, and here we are... already.

Sathish2388

ecloud.. Hi Please follow the below steps which has been given below..

1. Turn off your computer then remove the power cable ( AC Adapter)

2. Look underneath your laptop you could see a small battery reset pinhole where you have to insert paperclip and hold it down for 10 to 15 seconds then remove the paperclip

3.  connect the AC adapter then turn on the computer and check whether the problem is resolved or not..

Mcafee75

Nicely written, but i have no idea more about it. Mcafee activate

Edited the content by Acer-Samuel

billsey

Looks like you accidentally put a SPAM link in that last message. The Switch 7 doesn't have a battery reset pin hole and likely your battery has gotten low enough that it really needs a reset in order to recharge. If you are still in warranty go ahead and have Acer fix it for you. If you are out of warranty the next step is to disassemble enough to disconnect the battery, press and hold the power button with the battery disconnected to bleed off any residual, then reconnect and reassemble to see if that will allow a charge again. If it fails to charge at that point it will probably need a replacement battery.

When you close the keyboard on a Switch 7 it doesn't turn it off, it puts it to sleep by default. The battery will still be active, though it's supposed to turn things off when the battery drops below a threshhold (3% I think). If it missed that critical level point the battery can be discharge beyond the point where it can be charged without causing excessive heat...

ecloud

Yeah there's no reset pinhole.  I run Linux, so it seems I need to get it configured to turn off automatically when the charge gets too low, next time I get a chance.  I do think the battery is OK though, because it got warm and was blinking amber for quite a while when I had it plugged in, and then it eventually stopped doing that, which I thought meant that it had charged beyond some percentage, or probably even charged up all the way.  So maybe it's just the power management firmware misbehaving after that, and thus needing this battery-disconnected reset?  I sure wish there was a way to do that without opening it up.

I have warranty but I'm in Europe now; shipping it there at my expense and then having it shipped back at my expense is quite some hassle.  They will only ship it to a US address, so that can be my mom's place, then I can pick it up next year, next time I visit.  But that's a few months away.  If I ask her to ship it back here, I have to figure out how it should get documented as being a return after warranty repair, so that I don't have to pay import tax on it.

billsey

Tough call there. I'm guessing the battery did get too low and tripped the little bit of code that's installed on the newer lithium-ions to mitigate the fires and such they used to have. I don't know of any easy ways to bypass that. You might check with Acer support to see if they will support sending it to a local repair depot instead of back to the US, but that's liable to be something they can't do without escalation to someone higher up than the phone jockeys.