CMOS battery location on crappy Dell (UN)Inspiron 2650

[RealBlackStuff]

The other day I picked up a Dell Inspiron 2650 laptop.
It needs a new CMOS battery, but for the life of me I cannot find it!
Anybody here can give me directions (or an image)?
Thanks much in advance.

BTW Happy St. Paddy's Day to you all!

[killer]

Is this any help? http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/s ... /index.htm

Happy St Paddy day to you, matey.

[Harryc]

The CMOS battery is located on the edge of the motherboard near the floppy drive ribbon cable connector. The entire motherboard needs to be removed to access it. And as if that's not enough fun it's a specialty battery with tabs spotted on it so it can be soldered in. I'm in the process of finding a conventional battery holder and replacement cell. If you have another solution I'd love to see it.
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : August 19, 2008 11:29 AM

http://chrisjhughes.blogspot.com/2006/0 ... -2650.html

[RealBlackStuff]

Great find Harry, thanks!

[RealBlackStuff]

If you ever have to work on a Dell laptop (doing a friend a favor), you really appreciate the simplicity of a Thinkpad!
What a complicated piece of junk!
You have to remove at least 38 screws, the keyboard, the palmrest, the LCD-lid and all sorts of shields etc. just to get to the CMOS battery!

[craigmontHunter]

I know the feeling. My latitude LS, you need to take off the keyboard bezel, keyboard, now you have the memory, then (IIRC) the screen, upper palmrest and touchapd, heatsink. then you can change the battery.

[A31]

If you ever have to work on a Dell laptop (doing a friend a favor), you really appreciate the simplicity of a Thinkpad!
What a complicated piece of junk!
You have to remove at least 38 screws, the keyboard, the palmrest, the LCD-lid and all sorts of shields etc. just to get to the CMOS battery!

Like that Acer TravelMate 2501 I was working on, trying to replace the 40GB IDE HDD in it because it had a corrupted Windows XP Home Edition on it. Had to remove the battery to get to the [censored] thing!!

I don't like Dells, though I must say that my Grandad has a 1990s Dell Dimension and it has never broken, but he's had to re install Windows several times on it. Think it has Windows 98SE on there at the moment, it did have XP Pro at one point...

I think removing 38 screws, keyboard and palmrest to get to a CMOS battery is a bit over the top really...!!

[sysiphus]

If you ever have to work on a Dell laptop (doing a friend a favor), you really appreciate the simplicity of a Thinkpad!
What a complicated piece of junk!
You have to remove at least 38 screws, the keyboard, the palmrest, the LCD-lid and all sorts of shields etc. just to get to the CMOS battery!

Indeed. As a former owner of an Inspiron 2650, I can attest to this. The one bright spot was the easily-swappable hard drive...which still hardly made up for the a) shoddy build quality, b) inadequate cooling (with the P4m), c) single user-accessible RAM slot (other one required major surgery), d) non-swappable optical drive, and of course, the kicker, e) the P4m chip on the 845MZ chipset, which was a slower, hotter, less efficient combination than the Pentium III machines still available at the time.

[yak]

This reminds me of a certain HP laptop I was repairing. It just had a sticky TouchPad button that I wanted to clean.

Man, I had to get the frickin' motherboard out to get to the TouchPad, not kidding!

And you're right, that's where I really appreciated the way ThinkPads are built.