DEAD mobo battery....Cant hold the BIOS values..

"Bill Alty" <nosp@mwanted.com> wrote in message
news:7do7g0F2c10nvU1@mid.individual.net...
>A mate of mine asked me to look at his Tosh lappy but I don't normally
>touch laptops so I'm flying a bit blind so to speak. First thing I should
>say is that the battery is knackered so all this is with the laptop running
>on AC mains power.
>
> Out of 25 attempts, it's only successfully booted into Windows (XP Home)
> just 3 times. When it does boot into Windows, as soon as it gets past the
> blue "Welcome" screen and things begin to load, there's a constant beeping
> sound. Doesn't matter what you do - could be in Word typing a letter;
> could be looking at photographs; could be on the internet or whatever, the
> bleeping constantly goes on at a rate of 1 bleep per second. Everything
> seems to work OK once booted, apart from the bleeping.
>
> On the 22 ocassions it failed to boot into Windows, almost immediately
> after pressing the power button, there is just a black screen with the
> phrase "Set default value? (Y/N)" at the top left, and "BIOS V1.40" at the
> top right - pressing the Y or N keys has no effect whatsoever and nothing
> else happens no matter what keys you press or how long you leave it.
>
> I've tried all the usual ways of getting into the BIOS (Del; F2; F1; F8
> etc) and can't get in. I have a copy of Hiren's Boot Disc and tried to
> boot from that CD but it won't. I tried setting the CD drive as the first
> boot device in the Toshiba HW Utility from within Windows and also tried
> hitting F12 on bootup but it will not boot from CD and I can't get in the
> BIOS.
>
> One thing I noticed while in Windows was that the system clock wouldn't
> hold the correct time, which I think points to a dead RTC or BIOS battery.
> Anyone confirm that and give any pointers as to how I should proceed?
>
> Thanks
>