For the past few months the lithium ion battery on my wife's computer has been losing it's capacity. Now it's gotten to the point where it won't keep the computer running more than a few minutes in the event of a loss of AC power. Up to this point this hasn't been a problem because my wife never really takes the computer out of the house. A few weeks ago she started asking about getting a new battery. (You never can predict these things), and so I investigated this. I knew I'd have to make some kind of arrangements eventually, but truthfully with Batteries Plus asking 79.00 and the cheaper online offers questionable at best, I haven't been eager to jump into this, so thus far we haven't done anything.
The other day she told me about a new problem that she'd been having with the computer over the previous two weeks or so. It seems that every so often instead of the computer going through post and then booting up, a few seconds after you attempt powering it up a blue rectangular box pops up with a black screen behind it. Inside the box is an "enter password" message. Neither of us have ever seen this box before, nor do we have any idea what "password" it's looking for. (Our usual ones don't work). I tried removing AC power as well as the LI battery for a few days but this had no effect.
Toshiba has a 24 hour tech line that if you're lucky enough to connect to a intelligible person might be of some help. So I called them. The Indian girl seemed knowledgeable, I could understand her, and she suggested that the message was asking for a "CMOS" password, which she said someone must have put it into the boot sequence. I've never heard of anything like this and I told her that it was not possible that anyone in this house could have installed this into the computer. I know that I didn't, and I'm only slightly more computer literate than my wife, which is not saying much.
The tech suggested that we will need to reset the CMOS by pulling the internal battery. According to her, the battery could be defective as well. Now I can certainly pull the battery and replace it as well if need be, however I have my doubts about that being the cause of this. This laptop is not that old and I have to question if this is what the problem actually is. If it is in fact a dead CMOS battery, why would it lock me out of BIOS? And if it isn't, why did it happen in the first place?
Unbeknownst to me my wife has stored all the Grand Children's pictures on this computer with no backup anywhere else. So if anyone has any rabbits they might be able to pull from their hat, I'd really sincerely appreciate any advice. Thanks, Lenny