So for some context, after several months of owning my SteamDeck LCD (Originally 64gb but upgraded to 256) I noticed sometimes I would experience random hard shutdowns. Without any warning the system would just shut off.
It didn’t happen all the time, like months could go by of regular use and it would never happen. And sometimes it would happen several times in a row. This made it incredibly difficult to troubleshoot.
I had read from other people experiencing the same or similar issue to try various things
- Reimage SteamOS
- Recalibrate battery
- Put battery into shipping mode
- Disable WiFi energy saver
- Use SteamOS beta
And none of these worked. It was driving me absolutely crazy and I was ready to do an RMA. Until the other day, I finally found a way to trigger the hard shutdown with 100% certainty. Connecting to a 2.4ghz WiFi network.
I read some people had issues with a combined 2.4ghz and 5ghz network, so I thought having a separate SSID with only 1 might help, so first I tried a 2.4ghz only network. Every single time I tried to connect, hard shutdown. So I switched it to 5ghz only, not a single issue since.
What was happening was when I played my Deck out in my living room the WiFi signal was weaker so it would switchover to 2.4ghz more often and when that happened? Hard instant shutoff.
It sounds crazy and I have no idea why this occurs, but hopefully Valve can find a fix. I wanted to post about it here in case someone else was experiencing this same very annoying problem
That’s exactly what was happening to me too, sometimes the battery level would go from like 80% to 50% after a shutdown and I tried recalibrating to no avail
So far I’ve been purely 5ghz since making this post and have had 0 shutdowns since, so hopefully that’s something you can do as well haha.
And yeah I hope it’s something valve can fix and its not a weird hardware issue