First post, by ramiro77
Hello Guys! I received this beautiful laptop. It was almost pristine. It features a 133 mhz Pentium MMX Processor, 16mb ram onboard (plus 8mb edo sodimm), C&T 65554 2mb video, CD-ROM drive (no floppy drive 😢 ), and a dead 1.4gb hdd.
I started taking a look at this beauty and I noticed it was something like bricked. It was impossible to enter to bios settings or anything. So I started dissasembling the whole machine and found two dead and leaking Ni-MH batteries. One 7.2v pack for RTC and one 3.6v pack for CMOS. I disconnected those and voila! The laptop resurrected from ashes! Then I replaced the hard disk. I put in it a 6gb IBM hdd which was almost new. Then I installed win95. Everything went like a breeze. Here formatting:
But I had to find a solution for the RTC/CMOS batteries issue. I couldn't find any similar batteries to use. So I took a close look at the space under the palmrest and I noticed that my unit doesn't have RJ11/RJ45 board. So I could use that space to fit a board which contains CR2032 cells with their respective diodes to prevent charging. I ran some tests and found that the machine would save settings perfectly with more than 5v for RTC and more than 2v for CMOS. BINGO! Two CR2032 batteries in series for the RTC and just only one for CMOS.
I ended designing a little board which contains the three batteries, two diodes and a connector. It's working like a charm!
Pics:
The little and simple design:
Ready for iron:
Now ready for cleaning and throwing the board to the acid:
I applied flux (or some kind of rust protector for boards, I don't really know it's name. Here is sold by the name "flux") and this is how it looks while it dries:
Component side:
Solder side:
And here I'm running some tests.
Next step: disassembly the entire laptop to clean plastics and search for signs of rust, leaking caps or anything that could potentially damage this neat machine.
Hope you liked it! 😀
