R30 CMOS battery holder? Do I have a Brick? NEVERMIND

[Red_October_7000]

Well the other day my R30 decides not to come out of standby mode, instead it lights all the lights except HDD and runs the fan at full speed. I re-start it and it doesn't boot properly. I alternately get stop errors or hangs at the XP load screen. Some fiddling around with re-booting leads me to believe the CMOS battery is dead -it's forgetting things like the time and the IRQ settings of the PCI devices. If I manually re-set these to legal values (as opposed to times almost a century in the future or past and things like all PCI devices disabled or sharing the same IRQ value) it will boot up OK but then forget everything on shutdown. OK, this seems simple, bad CMOS battery. I pull the old one and head to radio shack... but it looks like the holder is broken off the mother board at the end closest to the hinge. Naturally changing the CMOS battery didn't do anything -I still get errors. I tried re-soldering it using three increasingly technological methods -paper clip held in butane lighter flame, old-fashioned electric resistance iron (25 watts), and modern "Cold Heat" type iron, all of which brought no joy in re-solding the holder. I'm not quite sure just what is broken, the solder or the pigtail, but whatever it is, I want to know if this can be repaired or should I start looking for a new laptop?

If I should start looking for a new one, is the A31P still the king of the hill in terms of IBM-made Thinkpads? (I won't have anything to do with the Lenovo branded ones).

NEVERMIND! My dad actually had a look at it and re-soldered the holder; he's much better at soldering then I am, and, moreover, not afraid to bollux up a main board by soldering on it. So it does work now.

[hjanzen]

Your post strikes me.
Two month ago I had the same booting troubles with my R30 as you had.
After some tests people adviced me to get a replacement systemboard at ebay. After install it prooved the CMOS battery of it was dead. And yes, while removing the battery the solder joint of one of the legs of the holder broke...

Fortunately, like you , I found someone willing to re-solder it, and the laptop is running fine now.
However, carefull inspection of the original board showed the crack in the solderjoint at the same place..

Let it be a warning to anyone who wants to replace the CMOS battery of this laptop to be extremely carefull since the connection of the holder to the systemboard is very weak indeed.

[virge]

Thanks to both of you for noting your problems here. I purchased a R30 off Ebay assuming that the only problem was a dead CMOS battery. Tested the battery as good and then searched here. Thanks to your posts, I saved myself the frustration of having to figure this out myself. I wrapped copper wire wrapped around my $9.99 soldering iron (no wattage control, tip the size of your pinky) to get a fine tip and thought I would fix the break in the connection. Boy was I wrong! I think I got the soldering part right, but it still didn't work. *insert a few hours of resoldering and troubleshooting* I popped the battery holder off completely and noticed two problems-- #1 it looked glued on and not soldered at all, #2 it was backwards with the terminals reversed. I asked my brother in law to solder wire leads to the mother board using a much better iron, connected the CMOS battery and BINGO! Fixed! Thank you all and hopefully someone else down the line will find this information useful.