Quite some time ago I picked up a trio of IBM Thinkpad 560Z laptops from the usual eBay suppliers as part of a DDJ column project. One turned into a digital picture frame, our Larval Engineer has another (because it was maxed out with 128 MB of RAM), and I just fired up the third (96 MB!) to discover whether it could serve as a text-only terminal without too much trouble.
Alas, the BIOS battery was dead. I’d replaced the dead OEM cell some years back with a (surplus) lithium cell that’s a bit too small, so it only lasted a few years rather than a decade, but the cells were on the shelf. Soooo, I put in another one, just like the other one:
After nudging the date & time into the current millennium, it then failed to boot Ubuntu 8.04: evidently the mighty 4 GB CompactFlash drive (jammed into a CF-to-IDE adapter) has bit rot.
It’s a prime candidate for the text-only version of Tiny Core Linux, except that a 560Z can’t boot from either USB or CD-ROM, which means getting the files on the “hard drive” requires extraordinary fiddling. Drat!
FWIW, when this battery fails, I think the (empty) main battery compartment has room for a CR123A cell that should outlast the rest of the hardware. I could blow two bucks on a replacement from eBay, but what fun is that?
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
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3 responses to “ThinkPad 560Z BIOS Battery Replacement”
A six years old ultra compact Ixus 60 has a rechargeable lithium battery built into the camera to save such settings as the date/time. The ease of replacing the battery was not on the top of the list when they designed the camera. A precision screwdriver set didn’t come with the camera…
See, now, if you’d gotten a Casio, the battery would be right under the cover…
Canon came to its senses and in the PowerShot SX130 the CR1220 is easily accessible under a rubber lid. The battery should last 7 years.