State of the Art engineering

A friend brought me a laptop that is beeping, annoyingly (like set volume to max). Continuously.

Google tells me this means "CMOS battery failure".

Wow! What idiot engineer thought this was such a significant event that the laptop should beep FOREVER (before and after boot) instead of just: "CMOS battery failure; Press F1 to continue" If having the correct time is so important, perhaps he should have inhibited the boot process UNTIL the battery had been replaced! Wouldn't want some poor slob to have to work with a laptop that is displaying the wrong time!

OK, cheap laptop so lets see how to get it apart:

formatting link

TL;DR... completely disassemble the laptop to EXPOSE the battery for replacement. Likely the same idiot engineer who decided it should beep endlessly ALSO decided to locate the battery in such a place that it can only be accessed by complete disassembly (even though a little "access opening" BEHIND the removable service panel would have done the trick!

Um, no.

"Sorry, Bob. I don't plan on spending an hour just to replace a disposable battery! Maybe you can find the speaker wires and CUT those!"

[Or, cut a hole through the case plastic so the battery IS exposed!]

There are some laptops that get their BIOS settings so wacky once the battery gets low that they become unstable and have weird crashes or boot errors. Thinkpads had that trouble (both IBM and Lenovo), a seemingly obvious hardware failure was actually just a dead battery. But at least IBM Thinkpads made them a pretty quick and easy job to replace.

Once the BIOS has detected it though, it should be able to reset to sane defaults. The beeping is usually for when the CPU can't run (faulty RAM, etc.) and therefore can't display the errors on screen, so my guess would be that there's a bug in the BIOS code that triggered the wrong error reporting mode. Or maybe they were too lazy to have more than one error reporting mode.

The real question is why manufacturers didn't switch to using rechargable batteries for this. Some laptop makers did in the 90s, but the trend reversed by the 2000s. For laptops as recent as the one in the video they could've used flash for the settings and a supercap to keep the time for the rare periods when the battery is removed or completely discharged. I suspect planned obsolescence.

Yes it's amazing how well some manufacturers burry the damn things. Sometimes there _is_ a service opening to the bottom of the laptop motherboard to access the RAM, but they decided not to make the battery accessible from there, so you have to pull out everything to access it from the top down. Again I suspect planned obsolescence.

That's a shame. I actually quite like replacing those batteries in laptops. It is also a good opportunity to clean it out and check for corroded connections. I bought a small tray of solder-tab CR2032s and I'm getting near the end of them now.

Mind you I prefer to do it on laptops of my own, that I want to use or sell on Ebay, because it can be very hard to get some of the clip-together cases apart without visibly damaging them. Especially those where the manufacturers keep their service manuals top secret.