Gateway Solo 2100 Laptop battery issue

[GiGaBiTe]

Does that include batteries that are openly sold as rebuilt, not “New OEM”?

Yep. Apple uses ICE to confiscate shipments of refurbished products, especially batteries.

Companies have gone so far as to grind off or black out Apple labels, but Apple still uses ICE to confiscate those as well.

Louis Rossmann of Rossmann Repair Group, who repairs Apple equipment has made many videos over the years outlining Apple's hardline stance against repair and refurbishment of their products over the years.

I entirely avoid trying to repair modern Apple products, because refurbished parts are so difficult to get, and aftermarket parts are a minefield of garbage.

 

[T-R-A]

Yep. Apple uses ICE to confiscate shipments of refurbished products, especially batteries.

And FWIW, not just Apple. In the "bad old days" when I used to work for a cellphone refurbisher (that now no longer exists), we had a "raid" from what was said to be the FBI (probably ICE, as GiGaBiTe mentioned) and several of management (who likely knew about the issue) were "rounded-up" and grilled about BlackBerry batteries that were Chinese knock offs. The edict came down that anyone on the floor who was just in possession of said batteries was instantly discharged. Again, though, knowing the nature of the management there, there's no way they couldn't have known. Fortunately I (voluntarily) left after less than a year there and they closed a few months after that. Probably the low point of my electronics technician career. Now I'm very blessed to be where I currently work.

 

[Chr$]

Battery issue resolved!!

It wasn't the cells or the BMS, it was actually the laptop motherboard!

I had an almost-complete identical Gateway Solo 2100 laptop that I bought for spares (e.g. it had the FDD that I didn't originally have). Externally it's smashed up and the screen is awful, but it just about holds together to be able to turn on and use. I put my 'new' battery in it and it worked! It runs off battery without instantly dying and the BIOS power management (Fn+F2) shows sensible normal decreasing battery percentage etc. It's been on for half an hour on battery as I write this.

I wondered if it may be a BIOS issue, so swapped those over and the original laptop still wouldn't run on battery, so that couldn't be the issue. To confirm - my original laptop BIOS in the spares machine also works fine on battery.

So now, when I feel like it, I'll have to remove the m/b from the smashed up machine and put that into my original one.

For posterity, I've attached both Gateway 2000 Solo 2100 BIOS dumps that I had (v5.06 and v5.09). The original BIOS chips are Intel N28F020 (PLCC32).

 

[Brian Todd]

Great to hear you got it resolved!

 

[DeltaDon]

Take a look at: https://www.laptopu.ro/

 

[3lectr1c]

Can that software reflash the BMS chips? Edit: looks like it can...
Edit 2: ugh, it's an extremely expensive subscription with no option for a lifetime license, pass.......

 

[GiGaBiTe]

The price of that unit and a 12 month subscription is actually considerably cheaper than other specialist tools that a modest size repair shop would have and use. Like a PC-3000 used for data recovery will set you back thousands of dollars. Oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, etc. cost orders of magnitude that. What they want for that is a steal.

 

[3lectr1c]

I get that and all, but a subscription like that makes it useless for a hobbyist who may only rebuild a couple packs a year, and I’m in general I dislike charging subscriptions for products that absolutely don’t need to be. There’s no server side component that needs up keep for that I’d assume, but I agree that the price isn’t bad if I was a repair place rebuilding hundreds of packs a year.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

I hate subscription models as well, but in a case like that, it makes sense. Battery packs are changing all the time, it takes time and money to do all of the reverse engineering and adding support to your software for them. The manufacturer definitely isn't going to be handing that info out to the public.

They could go with the classic pay-per-update model, but you'd still be paying large sums of money to get the updates that support your specific battery. It may end up being more expensive in some cases.

 

[3lectr1c]

Yeah, fair enough I suppose. I guess I just wish that there was a single purchase option just for those who just want to rebuild old packs and don't care about further updates... but I suppose that's a pretty small use case!