Laptop CMOS battery

I seen a PII laptop for sale which is very cheap but the CMOS battery is flat and it has no hard drive.

I have not had much experience with laptop motherboards, will the CMOS battery be soldered directly into it?

 

What do you want a PII laptop for? Are you building a museum collection?

 

I have seen ones with the CMOS battery soldered on, I've seen one with a really odd rectangular battery with soldered termins, and I've seen some with the 'normal' CR2032 as well.

Your best bet is to find the specific model and get looking for the service manual, its bound to have something about it there.

I also echo michaelab's comments though....a P2 laptop seems pointless, unless you have something planned for it (linux wise, or use as a quiet server, smoothwall box or similar?).

 

Just a wireless web surfer, a PII will be fine [for less than £50]. I am currently using a P233 MMX with 64MB RAM and Windows XP (yep no joke!). Providing you don't do any more than basic surfing with Firefox or Office 97 stuff it is fine.

It is amazing what you can get out of computers with a bit of fine tuning, i.e stopping half the default services :.

P233 needs replacing and I have three choices:-

1) Spend £50 or so on a laptop with twice the processing power and RAM and with a battery (my P233 has no battery).

2) Spend £223 on a PIII IBM laptop but then I will have to add £60 for Windows XP OEM.

This then brings me to a £350 Acer Sempron laptop with a full 12 month warranty.

£350 is well out of my league at the moment, £220 is too much for a PIII so this PII seemed like a nice compromise.