Help with a craped out LapTop

Ok a very small flat head screw driver will work on a 6-7 side star screw... Thats the good part

the bad part is that i have no idea where the hell the cmos jumper or battery is, can anyone throw me a bone on this one. It is a compaq presario 700.

Ok guys I found the battery Now this is VERY important!

Do i have to power up the laptop while the batter is out or is just pulling the battery out then putting it back in then replaceing everything enough.

Reason why: I DONT WANT TO HAVE TO TAKE THIS DAMN LAPTOP APART TWICE!

Thanks

it should be ok to just pull the cmos battery, and the main battery, then let the system sit for a good 5 min to let the cmos die (5 min should be more then long enough). then put the thing back togeher and power it on. (make sure no power source is connected ot the laptop while letting it sit.) Thanks for the info onthe screwdriver, good to know

There is an easy solution to your problem. First, it's not a virus. Most bios manufactuers do have master passwords for such a situation. I believe that compaq laptops use the award bios. Go to their site with the bios version number, you can obtain that from compaq's website, then get the master bios password. If all this is too much trouble, then get a torx screwdriver, open the laptop and remove the bios battery for a few. Problem easy solved. Thread closed.


PuRe

Thanx for the tip pure ex, but I tried all the default passwords listed FOR every type of bios I could google for and NONE of them worked. This includes award, ami, and various other.

I KNOW you cannot get a bios virus but from my 13 years of dealing with computer hardware, I have never once had a bios password change itself. They have reset to nothing from a faulty battery but never changed all by themself. Seeing as no other human could have had contact with this computer besides me I can see no other option. My laptop did have the Kazaa trojon/back door, whatever you want to call that P2P program and that IMHO is a very good clue as to where a "bios virus" could come from.

Now
I know you can update bios with a floppy disk...
I Know viruses can come through floppy disks...

So why can a virus not infect bios...

Common sense tells me that if I can do it to my computer, then someone else can do it with a program/batch file. Meaning if i can run a program from a floppy disk that will patch my BIOS
then why can a virus not do the same thing. Only diffrence is the virus patches bios with a new password. Can anyone tell me with a straight face why this cannot happen?
And if you can i would like you to explain to me WHY?

This has nothing to do with this subject, but since you guys are laptop experts, can you tell me what the difference between a 40 GB Hard drive and 60 GB Hard drive is? I currently have a compaq persario 2525US and saw the 2 availabe options on hard drives and was just wondering if i put the 60 GB hard drive on my laptop, what changes would occur?

The difference between a 40GB and a 60GB is a 60GB has 20GB more capacity then the 40GB, but it's going to be a fresh harddrive, so you will need to install a new OS (Operating System, meaning "windows 2000, XP, etc.."), unless compaq has it installed already, and you will lose all previous information on your 40GB, because you replaced it with a 60GB. So I would recommend burn/backing up all important information onto a CD. (If possible)

Or, if you where talking about adding an additional harddrive (which I didn't know you could do with a laptop), the 40GB would be your master and the 60GB would be your slave, so you would have 60GB extra.

later,
Dru

You just need to give more information about what you mean. The straight up facts are, as Clone said, the 60 has 20 more gig than the 40.... but that's a no brainer. Are you asking about differences between an internal 40GB drive and an external 60GB drive (or vice versa)? Give us a little more detail so we can better answer your question...

Just a thought..
~ AciD

matrixlu as clonetheplanet and AciDriveHB mentioned, a 60 gig has 20 gigs more than a 40 gig.

You can always get the info on the 40gig copied to the 60gig through backup or direct copy depending on what you have available to you. Also your defrag and scan time is going to increase, since the smaller the drive the faster the scan.

If that's what you are asking, I hope that helps. If not, provide more info.

Guidance...

DO NOT short the positive and negative leads of a capacitor together! If the capacitor is CHARGED it will blow up in your face. Assuming it has enough voltage in it, but either way you could definitely damage it. These make good firecrackers if you have a power supply and old circuit cards around, btw. ;)

What you can do is short both leads to ground, just not two each other. Sure a laptop is not going to have huge capacitors and they will most likely not blow up, I just don't want people later in life finding an amplifier capacitor and deciding to short them. BAM. You wouldn't short the positive and negative leads of a battery together, I am sure some people have seen what happens when you do that to a 12 volt car battery. A capacitor is just a sophisticated voltage storage device designed to charge/store/ and leak of voltage using predetermined tolerances.

I have had similar problems with a Dell laptop. I ended up having to get a utility from Dell after sending in copies of my Company Name and Laptop serial number. None of the default passwords worked for me either, some motherboards have a bios reset jumper. Have you tried that?