Thinkpads Forum

Hello all,

I bought an old ThinkPad 760EL (type 9547-U4S) from eBay the other day to mess around with. The first thing I noticed was that the BIOS was horribly out of date, so I downloaded an EXE from IBM/Lenovo that extracts upgrade files to a blank floppy disk. I ran the program and it created a bootable BIOS upgrade disk. I popped that in the ThinkPad and ran the program but I ran into a rather irritating problem.

The program says that in order to upgrade the BIOS, the AC adapter must be connected and the laptop must have a charged battery inserted. As you can imagine, the battery in this laptop is nothing more than a big, gray paperweight. No charge whatsoever. As a result, the BIOS updating program will not run.

I've done some searching to find a way around it, but all of the other forum threads I've found have had instructions for other ThinkPad models. I figured they might be useful, but the files for those models are very different than the files for the 760EL. So, I'm asking here to see if anyone knows a way to get around the charged battery check so I can upgrade the BIOS. I suppose it's not extremely important to upgrade it, but it'd be nice if I could get it to work.

Thanks in advance.

These days T60p's and T61's keep my wife and me happy for most of our computing needs.

However, we do have an old ThinkPad 760 still loaded with the orginal Windows95 software. It has survived many spring cleanings because it supports a Turtle Beach sound card in a Dock I. Remember the small docking station with the big mouse ear speakers?

This combination creates amazing CD sound files from a MiniDisc audio input. Burned to CD's, the results make my wife the envy of many of her friends who also sing. Needless to say, we use it often for their performances as well.

Speaking of perfomance . . . the performance of the 760 with Windows95 and the Syntrillium sound software is amazing, given the old processor and relatively small memory size. As a result, I don't think we can improve on things even by moving the ISA sound card to a more modern desktop computer. So, I have no plans to upgrade anything. I mentioned all this boring detail to put the following suggestion into proper context.

BIOS upgrades always carry some risk! So, unless you have an issue, I would recommend not doing anything.

If you have an issue that requires a BIOS upgrade, you will find several people selling ThinkPad 760 batteries on eBay. Most are in the $30 range, plus or minus a little. Some even list warranties. My battery is still working fairly well or I might be tempted myself.

TucsonMTB . . . who hopes this helps

Well, I didn't want to risk any of the methods I found that removed the battery check, and I ran into an issue that required a BIOS upgrade, so I decided to buy a battery. Luckily, I found one on eBay for about $30. It's not the solution I was looking for, but at least it's a solution.

With all the money I'm spending getting this thing in working order, I'm beginning to wish I'd paid a little bit more for a newer laptop in the first place. Ah well, you live, you learn.

Some of the older BIOS updates on floppies use an autoexec.bat or config.sys file to ask the questions about there being an AC connector and a battery. If yours is one of those, you could edit/modify the .bat or .sys file and put the word REM followed by a space in front of the relevant battery questions. Then try it again.