Replacing a soldered battery

[tomstevens26]

Here's the deal...looking at a PC for a friend of the family. It's an ancient Packard Bell Legend 20CD. The system battery has died and needs to be replaced. The problem is this battery is soldered onto the motherboard. I've never soldered anything, so I have no idea how to go about this. I'm thinking it best to leave well enough alone and just tell her I can't replace it, but figured it wouldn't hurt to check here first to see if there was an easy solution.

Google yielded a website for this PC that explains that jumper J30 can be set to use either the internal soldered battery, or an external 3V battery. Going the external route means you unjump pins 3-4 and wire the +3V to pin 1 and a ground wire to pin 4. I'm assuming that this also requires soldering a wire to the battery and to the pins?

Thanks for any help w/ this dinosaur!
Tom

 

[islandtechengineers]

do you know anyone with any soldering experience? most likely if you go the external route you'll have to supply a home for the battery. hey, spend about 10 bucks for a cheap soldering iron, a de-soldering gun / tool and a spool of solder. after about 10 mins i bet you'll be able to de-solder that battery. If you can take a pc, strip it, then put it back as it was without any problems, you'll be able to solder after a little practice. or they can leave the machine on. I have an old pc i use for linux experiments...... no cmos battery holder and im to lazy to solder one in (i have a spare).

 

[MWink]

I would probably just solder in a new battery but if you're not comfortable with that, I'm pretty sure they make battery packs that would connect to that connector you see on the motherboard. The problem is finding one and possibly the price, but it should not require any soldering.

 

[MWink]

Something like this may work.

 

[tomstevens26]

Originally posted by: MWink
Something like this may work.

Thanks for the replies. I found several of those external packs, but they are all 3.6v. The battery in this PC is 3V. Any chance that would still work, or would the extra .6v not be a good idea?

 

[MWink]

I'm not 100% sure but I think there's a good chance a 3.6V would work. Also given how ancient this system sounds (486-pentium era) it probably wouldn't be a big loss if something went wrong.

 

[tomstevens26]

Thanks! Yeah, IIRC correctly from booting it up, it's a 486DX/66. I'm going to run the idea by the owner, and let her know she has the option. It may or may not work, but I want to make sure she's not going to hold me liable if it doesn't!!

thanks again!
Tom

 

[Zepper]

On the P-B's with soldered in batteries, there is almost always a header to connect an external battery to for when the soldered one dies. Just cut out the soldered one and plug the new one onto the header. I've rigged up a 2 or 3 AA battery holder to make a RTC/CMOS battery for these old machines. It works fine and the batteries are cheap to replace. There is a site out there with the mobo layouts and pinouts for the old Packard Hells (actually all the documentation that was available on the P-B site) - just do a web search for it. I believe it was PriorityOne that had the documents and info on P-B.
. And you can get CMOS batteries that are already soldered to legs. so you can just clip the current battery out (leaving some leg to solder to) and just solder the new one to the remaining legs. Be sure to note the polarity.

.bh.