Page 1 of And the award for environmentally destructive designed obsolescence goes to...

My old laptop is dying. It's about ten years old, and all of a sudden it doesn't want to start. I'm getting a whole lot of black screens, although sometimes it gets as far as POST, or even as far as Vista Start Up Repair.

Had a look online and the most common diagnosis is a dying or dead CMOS battery.

This is ACER. You don't just take a panel off and put in a new button battery. Oh no. There's a half hour, edited tutorial on Youtube telling you how to do it. Remove the back panels, take out the hard drives, the memory, the wi-fi card. Flip it over, take off the button panel, take out the keyboard, the rest of the top cover, disconnect all the ribbon cables, remove the LCD screen, flip it back over, undo the rest of it, disassemble until you hold the motherboard in your hand. You can now access the proprietary ACER battery and replace it. Then reverse to put the laptop back together.

Somewhere during this surgery, if you haven't broken anything, you will decide to buy a new laptop.

It's not a big deal, just a bit of a pain, as I've been using the ACER to back up my files.
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Jitendar Canth

Quote:
"I thought what I`d do was, I`d pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes."

Site Reviewer at DVD Reviewer & MyReviewer

Carving out a niche with a pneumatic drill at Anime @ MyReviewer.com

This item was edited on Monday, 25th November 2019, 14:24

Windows Vista?




Can confirm, as my family's/friends' tech support operator, whenever I hear "can you take a look at my laptop" I die a little on the inside.

Quote:
Gareth Williams says...
"Can confirm, as my family's/friends' tech support operator, whenever I hear "can you take a look at my laptop" I die a little on the inside."
Amen Brother. Luckily the only PC I've had to fix recently has been my own, which was displaying symptoms quite similar to Jitendar's above. No BSODs to speak of, but after failing to start after a proper shutdown for the 5th consecutive time, I thought it had got over its problem and was booting up, until the screen displayed a black wallpaper with the words 'This copy of windows is not genuine' in the bottom right corner. I'm not the type to panic, although this was un-nerving me a lot. Safe mode crashed on startup, chkdsk was only getting to stage 3, and I was properly getting worried as there was a lot of important crap on that hard drive.

So I resorted to the physical standby. Unplug the bugger and break out the hoover, resetting the CMOS jumper in the process. The GFX card was particularly stuffed with dust and I think that may have been the main culprit. Long story short, it booted first time and doesn't appear to have been affected by its downtime at all.
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Writer`s Release

..... and you've now backed up that important crap....
Ste