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Friday 31 January 2020

Do You Have To Match A CMOS/BIOS Battery Exactly?

The short answer is as long as it's the same voltage and you're not replacing a rechargeable version with a non-rechargeable version then it should be fine - as long as it fits that is!

The other day I had a retro laptop that had a dead CR2330 in it and after looking through my (ever growing) collection of new batteries I had everything but the one I wanted!


Thankfully the one I needed to replace was on a lead rather than having to fit in to a socket so I could change it for a similar size battery of the same voltage (3V) as the numbers that make up the battery code are basically its circumfrance and thickness.


Thursday 30 January 2020

How To Replace The IBM ThinkPad 380D (Type 2635) CMOS Battery


On the IBM ThinkPad 380D laptop the CMOS batter for the BIOS is located under the RAM cover on the bottom of the laptop so (after first removing the power cable and the main system battery) you then need to remove the RAM cover found underneath the laptop:


As you can see from the above photo, the CMOS battery is hiding next to the system RAM, it's held in place by some double-sided tape so to remove it all you have to do is unplug the lead and then carefully pull the battery away from the laptop.


You now have 2 options; Option 1: Look on eBay for a replacement or Option 2: Make your own replacement...



If you chose option 2 then read on...

Now you have removed the CMOS battery, you now need to use a knife or other sharp object to carefully remove the plastic surround of the battery to reveal the terminals connected to the battery:


Using some pliers, very carefully remove the terminals from the battery so you are left with this:

 For the next part you will need some heat-shrink tubing, some conductive tape and a replacement CMOS battery.


Using the conductive tape, secure the red lead to the positive side of the replacement battery and the black lead to the negative side of the battery.

Next you need to cut a small piece of heat-shrink tubing to size and place over the battery.


Using a heat gun (or a soldering iron held very closely) shrink the heat-shrink around the battery - the reason for doing this is to prevent the battery from short-circuiting to any of the metal parts of the laptop.

Now all you need to do is insert the replacement CMOS battery back in to the laptop:


Done!

Sunday 19 January 2020

Todays Car Boot Sale Haul - Laptops and Shuttle PC


This morning (after not going for a few weeks) I woke up early and had an urge to visit my local (all year round) Car Boot Sale and I'm so pleased I did as I came back with this lot:


After haggling I got each laptop for £1.80 and the shuttle for £10 - there's no power supplies with any of the laptops and no hard disk drive in the Shuttle.

Initial tests of the Shuttle (now that I've added a hard disk drive and installed Windows XP Pro on it) show that it seems to be in good working order, although there looked like several decades of dust inside it before I took it outside and air dusted it!   I've already swapped out the optical drive as this one didnt like to boot an OS install disc from it - all I need now is to find a suitable floppy disk drive for it.

Now all I need to do is to dig out the 16V IBM ThinkPad power supplies I got the other month so I can start testing the laptops...


Thursday 16 January 2020

Samsung Q1 Ultra Mobile PC NP-Q1u

I wont this little beauty on eBay the other day as untested, I whipped out my trusty old retro universal power adapter and it powered up straight away!

I am currently installing Windows XP Pro on, I've already downloaded the drivers from Samsungs website so it shouldn't be too long before this is up and running.


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