VOGONS


First post, by charliegolf

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Hi.
Tonight I took my fujitsu lifebook p120 laptop apart to replace a dead cmos battery, I saw a cr2330 soldered to the Mainboard and desoldered it to order a new one. I then found another rechargeable varta battery pack tucked away down the side. Just wondering if anyone knew why there would be 2 batteries?
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Reply 1 of 4, by BitWrangler

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Occasionally the clock and NVRAM (CMOS) batteries were separate, also a thing later in the 90s was having the security settings like supervisor password and hard drive encryption key stored on a different battery backed RAM than the regular CMOS settings.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 3 of 4, by Thermalwrong

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If it was around 6/9 volts, it was probably a NIMH bridge battery. That's to keep the memory contents while the computer's in standby when swapping batteries over.

The password stuff is usually stored on an EEPROM in a lot of the mid 90s laptops.

Reply 4 of 4, by BitWrangler

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Ah yes, forgot that was a thing for sales execs on the road... along with external chargers you could plug a couple of spare batteries into... if you asked for that at a laptop store these days their eyes would bulge.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.