Thinkpads Forum

I have looked everywhere for an answer. The BIOS on 600s and 770s can be flashed without a working battery by modifying some of the files on the DOS BIOS upgrade floppy. I am trying to flash the BIOS on a 755CSE so I can install the M-Wave software and get the sound working. With Windows 95 you have to flash to the latest BIOS, with plug and play support, before M-Wave will work. I have tried everything and no luck. Does anybody have any workarounds? Can I somehow put electricity like a 9 volt battery to one of the battery posts and fool the machine into thinking there is a working battery? I have a 760 battery that is good and I seem to recall that you can remove one of the plastic battery posts in the 755CSE and make a 760 Li-ion battery work? I cannot find a good 755CSE battery (Ni-Mh) out there for less than about $100 which is just too much. I also have 3 dead 755 CSE batteries. Can I rebuild them somehow or deep cycle them or hyper-charge them or something?

google for "thinkpad bios update dead battery" without quotes... the "trick" appears to be making a CLEAN boot diskette, then copying the bios files over and flashing manually with switches... "FLASH2.EXE /U" for the 390,600,760 dunno if flash2.exe is used for the 755 but i assume it is the same as the others.

As far as the battery packs... NiMH are the easiest to rebuild given decent soldering skills and patience in cracking open the battery case... "crack" being the keyword which they tend todo... getting the case open is the hurdle. Li-Ion batteries can be dangerous... the whole lithium exploding violently if exposed to moisture (even humidity) does not exist on NiCad and NiMH...

As far as fooling the system... i dunno about that one... best bet is to rebuild... at about $2 per cell... $18 - $24 is quite cheap.

Yes thanks I have actually made it work on a 770 before but the structure of the BIOS files is different on the 755 and the same switches do not work. I do have three dead ni-cad batteries and I think rebuilding one of them is the way to go.

I decided to just install Windows 3.11 on it with the old BIOS...very nostalgic. Mwave sound and modem works and I got the tcp/ip stack installed and a 10/100 pcmcia 16 bit NIC. It has IE 5.0 and will get on the internet but any kind of java or flash hangs it.