Cleaning a Game Boy (Advance) Power Switch
Channel: makho
Date: 2020-02-21

Having power related issues with your Game Boy console? It's probably your power switch. This issue affects all Game Boy consoles except for the DMG. Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Advance SP consoles seem to be particularly sensitive to this issue though. 

Symptoms of this issue: really poor battery life (though that could also be your batteries/mods/flash cart and so on), flickering power LED, game resets, and if touching the power switch (without actually moving it) triggers any of this, your issue is definitely within the switch. 

The issue is that carbon deposits build up on the gold plated contacts inside the power switch over time. This is caused simply by turning the console on and off and is largely unavoidable without a significant redesign of the power circuit. 

The solution is to clean up this build up and unfortunately it does require disassembling the switch. 

Without actually cleaning out the deposits (i.e. just dropping some contact cleaner in the switch), you are only delaying the inevitable. Other solutions may work temporarily but after a few weeks or months, the problem will return. 

Here's the short version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G946mQCkIQc

Previous video: https://youtu.be/nIz7qbfCQHA