I bought a Micron Gobook2 300mhz off ebay, well actually two of them but will get to that later. The first posted when I received it (its been stripped of hardrive and main battery). I stuck in a hardrive and installed Puppy Linux. Fine it worked ok, good screen, whole ball wax. Wouldnt hold clock or other bios settings. Cmos battery of course. Well the sadistic engineers who designed this thing made it impossible to change out battery without completely disassembling whole computer, even removing the motherboard. I got to it, replaced it, even drilled a hole where old battery was glued to the case so I didnt have to disassemble in future, put it all back together except the little delicate built in ribbon connector on motherboard that keyboard ribbon connected to broke. I tried turning it on and fan comes on and stays on (didnt do that before) and I get the one beep, then nothing, no post, nothing. Ok I scewed up, gave $22 for it so no huge catastrophy. Seller had bunch of these laptops and still had some listed on ebay. Got another one. Stick hardrive in it and it boots fine. Also wont hold settings. This time I'm not stupid (or so I think with my $22 worth of new found experience), I get the dremel out and cut little square of plastic out on bottom of laptop where I made hole in other one and am dead on target, as cmos battery is glued to square of plastic I cut. Dangles by its lead. Snip it and carefully solder in another 3V lithium coin battery to the existing leads. (yes I solder red to positive and black to negative) Test it to be sure, yep, 3V. Wrap battery in electric tape and stuff it back up into hole. (and no I didnt nick the motherboard with the dremel) Turn on computer. Fan comes on and stays on, one beep, and nothing. ? How did I screw up and is there anyway to get computer to post? I havent worked with many laptops, but no desktop ever refused to even post just because I replaced the cmos battery. All that ever happened to me in past replacing cmos batter is it meant I had to redo the bios settings.

There are some computers that have a bios battery and a RTC that has a battery built in. If you keep changing the bios battery you would never fix the time issue. Most RTC's are square boxes and on laptops built on to the mother board. Depends on the type of soldering system you used. There are only a few that are both esd and emf protected. You could have erased the bios or smoked any other component. The temperature is critical too along with the time you spend on the board. You can't exceed 1 second in most cases. This all brings us back to how flimsy a multiplaner mother board is. There are various signal planes and voltage planes in the board. A slight bend, heat and the via's can break or the signal lan can be destroyed without you seeing it. I'd remove the battery, remove any flywheel energy from the system and then try again. Most computers don't need a bios battery to boot. I read it wrong and answer it wrong too. So get off my case you goober.

I am not that concerned with the time (I can set up script to reset it every time I go online), but the default bios settings are very annoying and force me to manually reset them every time I turn on the computer. Does the RTC handle those too. If so why even have a cmos battery? Anyway I have already tried removing battery after laptop refused to post, but no change and no post. As to soldering I soldered to the three or four inch wire leads I cut off the old battery, not onto the motherboard itself. Used small low watt soldering iron and didnt try to smelt the dang metal out of the laptop. Sorry, but suffice it to say I have soldered electronics before successfully. And on the first laptop, even the leads were unplugged from motherboard when I did the soldering since I had the whole laptop disassembled. Sorry cant say what laptop would do if I had tried to boot it with old battery gone, but prior to soldering new battery into place. I kinda wish I knew that.

Anybody every hear of this happening before. It happening on two computers with exact same effect seems little too much to believe in chance. Remember first one had no soldering on anything connected to the motherboard. I did finally find a pdf users manual for this thing but it doesnt even mention cmos battery. Apparently they didnt consider it a user servicable part and rather preferred you buy a new model laptop when cmos battery quit. Unfortunately its not practical to hire somebody to work on a $20 laptop. Your average repair shop wouldnt even look at it for $20.