Re: Laptops dying of old age
- From: Barry Watzman <WatzmanNOSPAM@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:31:24 -0400
No, I don't think that what you experienced had anything to do with the CMOS batteries (although I can't rule it out entirely). Most laptops will work fine with no CMOS batteries at all (but there ARE exceptions). Of course time will be lost, and very often you will have to go into the BIOS and at least "restore defaults" every time you power the machine on, but normally it won't keep you from booting.
Laptops do have CMOS batteries. For reasons that are to me unfathomable, very few laptops allow for these to be externally replaced. Worse yet, on some machines they are soldered to the motherboard. They may be either single use lithium batteries (coin cells, although, again, occasionally soldered in place (but sometimes not), or rechargeable (Toshiba is a fan of rechargeable batteries (usually NiMH coin cells). In most cases they charge only when the laptop is actually ON (not plugged in, but truly ON), they take 48 hours to charge fully, and they will then work for 2 to 4 weeks without any further charging.).
A common cause of problems in newer machines is severe overheating. All modern laptops have fans and heatsinks, and after 6 to 24 months, the heatsinks get clogged up with dust and dirt and hair, in some cases so bad that the fan blades can no longer even turn (I've pulled a couple of cubic inches of dust / dirt / hair out of them when cleaning them). Then things overheat and, sometimes, die. The problem effects both the CPU and the chipset. Cleaning the CPU cooling system is easy on some laptops (remove an access panel and you can get at everything) and nearly impossible on other models (you have to remove the screen from the base, disassemble the base, and in some cases actually remove the motherboard to get to the fan and heatsink UNDER the motherboard). Another problem is failure of BGA (ball grid array) chip mountings.
However, your laptops are older, and are likely so old as to not have these particular problems. Note, with respect to the battery, that if the battery has become SO deteriorated that it is leaking corrosive electrolyte ... that's a different problem.
One other thing to keep in mind is that laptops have power supplies just like desktops. The battery and AC adapter only provide inputs to these power supplies; the internal circuitry runs off of the multiple outputs of these power supplies, generally +3.3v and +5v (sometimes +12 also). As motherboards and power supplies have had problems with bad capacitors, so to can laptops, so this is another potential common problem.
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