Thinkpads Forum

HOORAY, my 701c arrived today and i decided to do what any discerning thinkpad owner does, wreck it. Bearing in mind, at this point, it more or less worked. I got the 161,163 messages like you would expect. Hit ESCAPE and it would continue to boot, or you could enter bios (hit F1) or you could enter diagnostics (hit ENTER)
As we all know the batteries corrode, so i tried to remove the main battery and pulled away the contacts from the system board with it. Great, now i need a new system board, and a new battery. Removed the keyboard, screen and got to the system board. Removed the system board and saw that the standby battery was corred to nothingness so removed it. Then i removed the main board and saw the RTC battery had more or less dissolved, taking other bits on the board with it. Great, now i need a new main board.
After putting it all back together i noticed that without the standby battery (the 1.2v rechargeable) i can't enter the bios when you press F1. I can still get into the diagnostics, but no bios. So i tried to reconnect the standby battery and the contacts broke on the system board (they were totally corroded). By this time i already knew that i needed a new system board so i had nothing to lose anyhow.
Now i have a useless machine waiting for an organ transplant. I am not angry by the way, this is just another project i have set aside for myself, like my 770s that i am playing with. I was hoping for a less expensive result though

hjanzen, thanks for that. i may actually buy that if my 'plan A' doesn't work. I saw an ad for a main board and a system board which has cost me 50 Aussie dollars including postage to Italy (just hope it gets here LOL). However i was wondering about the battery that was soldered onto the mainboard. Have seen something that looks exactly the same on a website http://www.smallbattery.company.org.uk/ ... alogue.htm

and it got me thinking if the battery on the 701 was indeed capacitive or a normal lithium battery. I soldered on a normal 3 volt battery from a t41 and i still got the 161,163 messages despite a healthy 2.8v on the battery.

Get the HMM here: http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc ... tpvol2.pdf

For batteries, see these:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=78767
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=73649
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=74898
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=81514

Thanks. I have the HMM, am pretty sure it doesn't mention anything about the battery soldered to the mainboard. It definitely doesn't say what the 1.2v nimh batt does. As i posted earlier, now that i don't have this battery at all, i have no way to enter the cmos. Before i removed the 1.2v nimh i could enter the cmos, but even with a 'new' battery soldered to the mainboard itself, i was unable to SAVE any settings at all. The HMM says to charge the 1.2v nimh for 24 hours and test the voltage, so now i imagine that this thing controls the bios. Sadly i don't have a spare to test this theory. Will wait for my spare boards to arrive from Oz

The battery soldered to the mainboard underside can be replaced by a 'normal' CMOS battery like this:[IMG=http://img710.imageshack.us/img710/6382/1000758r.jpg][/IMG]

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

and available here:

http://www.ebay.nl/itm/150435321868?ssP ... 1423.l2649

The other one at the upper board is a NiMH 1.2V 30mAH cell like this :
http://www.electronic-direct.be/product ... htm?lng=en

thanks. I have already soldered a battery onto the board as posted previously and nothing changed. Which leads to to believe that the rechargeable battery is the one that does all the work. The board is destroyed where the batteries have leaked and there is no way i can do anything with it now. Just have to sit and wait for the boards to arrive from Australia

got a new pair of boards from Austrailia and i still have the same problems as before. The bios freezes, or the computer freezes at random intervals. So now i am thinking that they both have faulty on-board memory. The board that arrived today fails the memory test ( it counts to 7000 and fails) , but when i add an 8mb memory stick it counts all the way to 16000 and then freezes)
My old board won't even show me the bios page or anything. So now i have ordered the 'NEW' board from Canada as seen in an earlier post.

well, quite miraculously i have got my old boards working with a bit of trial and error. The new boards really didn't want to play. The new SYSTEM board would not recharge the STANDBY battery but had a good Main battery connector so i desoldered the connector ready to place on my ild system board when my new battery arrives.
My old motherboard is now completely without the button battery soldered onto the board and as a result (no idea why) all is working well. The motherboard i got from Australia has a miniscule resistor missing near the onboard ram which is why it was failing no doubt.
Now all i need is my new battery, more memory ( just for the sake of it) and a bit of tlc.