If you’ve managed to get your hands on a Nintendo Switch you likely fall into one of two camps. Either the side of joyous, uninterrupted gaming, with the console acting and functioning like it should. Of the smaller group plagued by problems, such as the battery indicator one that Nintendo seems to have fixed with some new firmware. The bug would affect the console’s ability to accurately tell you how much battery was left, leading some to assume that the entire thing was just broken.
That’s not the case, and the latest firmware addresses that. Nintendo has released firmware version 3.0.1, which takes direct aim at the big causing the issue. Now you shouldn’t see your Switch drain rapidly from full battery to empty in just a few minutes, despite being able to still remain on for hours. But it’s not a blanket fix, and some users might still experience the issue.
And that’s where things step into crazy territory. Nintendo has some manual steps you can take to try and rectify the issue, but they’re ridiculous. First you need to charge your Switch as much as you can, for around three to fours hours. After that, you need to just leave it for about an hour doing nothing, while still connected to power. Following that you’ll need to leave your Switch idle on the Home Screen until it’s nearly drained, at which point you need to manually turn it off and let it sit in a corner for a further 30 minutes.
That alone takes a couple of hours, but Nintendo is advising users to repeat the above steps six times to hopefully fix the issue that the patch can’t. It’s just absurd.
Hopefully your experience with the Switch has so far been missing these tragic bugs, and hopefully Nintendo can start creating better fixes than this soon.
Last Updated: August 2, 2017
Matthew Figueira
August 2, 2017 at 11:26
Lol those steps are amazing XD
Admiral Chief
August 2, 2017 at 11:34
Six times…….the seventh time, you summon a Raptor
HvR
August 2, 2017 at 11:50
Might seem very weird manual fix but here is the probable technical reason why:
They most probably use an integrated chip with a coulomb counter to measure battery capacity.
This is the most accurate way in an electronic design to measure battery capacity (much better than voltage monitoring employed by most cellphones and laptops)
Now how a coulomb counter works is it takes instantaneous current readings during operation and calculates a total capacity (in milliampere-hours, current use over time) for the battery. But for it too work it needs an original count to know the target it is working from.
in car terms if I know I get 600km per tank of petrol and reset my odometer each time I know that after 300km I used half my tank.
Now like petrol usage current usage will vary a bit due to a whole crapload of factors so you use average of a number of counts. In the Switch’s they are using a average count of 6 which is why you need to do it 6 times and they want to let it drain idle because that will give you the most accurate capacity.
Somebody at nintendo probably made a f’up the firmware and reseted the count values to zero or low default value causing the problem
Admiral Chief
August 2, 2017 at 12:18
tl;dr
HvR
August 2, 2017 at 12:20
Short version: Die Switch sy battery counter; hy is gefok
Admiral Chief
August 2, 2017 at 12:22
Eish
HairyEwok
August 2, 2017 at 11:51
Instructions weren’t clear, switch is on fire, please send help.
Neji
August 2, 2017 at 12:47
That’s like the slot machine sequence from Ocean’s Thirteen…
BakedBagel
August 2, 2017 at 13:14
People are going to start digging into sick leave to make sure they do all these steps