BIOS battery examined

Now that even the bios battery I purchased directly from Dell in 2007 is starting to fail (spontaeous clock and bios reset et.c.) I thought I’d examine the bios battery to see if you could switch to a cheaper/better solution than another Dell battery.

As you can see from the first image the battery specs are: 7.2V, 20mAh, Ni-MH, 6/V20HR.

In the second image you see some nasty battery leakage and now we know that there are 6 x Varta V20HR (1.2V/20mAh each) in there, “paddles” for the cable and a metal strips in between for connection, on top and in between (barely visible in between the batteries in the picture). Furthermore the paddles and the metal strips are “punched” into the batteries (there’s probably some fancy technical term for that).

A bit of googling turned up a lot of results, the battery in question is common and cheap, the only problem being the remounting and punching/securing of electrical current to all the batteries.

I’ll leave y’all with this information for now as I personally don’t really crave a correct time and date on the l400… if you decide to make your own battery pack (and succeed) don’t forget to leave a comment!