That’s a Nickel Cadmium battery - Ni-Cd. It would be easy to replace with a 3 x AA cell holder containing 3 x Ni-Mh (Nickel Metal-Hydride) cells. These are usually 1.2v, so 3.6v in total and the charging mechanism is the same.
Don’t replace it with regular AA cells unless you can somehow disable the charging circuit.
Another alternative might be a single 3.7 volt cell, which is Lithium Thyonyl Chloride cell, but again disable the charging circuit.
There are 1000s of issues with old batterys in old computer systems - looks like you got lucky in that it’s not leaked…
Thanks all for your continued advice and interest. I busted out the trusty multimeter and I noticed that there was 4V across the backup battery plug when the laptop was powered on. So that’s the charging circuit. I left it plugged in for a few hours like that to see if there was any possibility of the CMOS/backup battery recharging after so many years.
When I restarted the laptop there were signs of life. The HDD light came on and the BIOS screen was visible on the LCD, though barely as the backlight seems to be broken.
A couple of CMOS warnings:
CMOS battery state low
CMOS display type mismatch
I managed to ESC through a couple of steps. Memory test was OK - 4 whole megabytes!
I started the diagnostics and was greeted to more lights and beeps, and then the bad thing happened. A loud “pop” and then nothing. I opened the case to find a small pool of brown fluid under the board that looks power-related.
I checked the backup battery plug with the multimeter as I know that gave a reading of 4V earlier. Now down to 3V so something has failed.
I feel this is getting beyond my abilities now, but there was proof of life! I saw the ASCII art “LASER LT321” logo, albeit briefly, and faintly.
I will see if I can find a vintage electronics workshop nearby to have these capacitors looked at…
Heh, believe it or not, you’re lucky. Getting off the hook with a few capacitors replaced is ideal.
You will then probably need to check the state of the disk drive and decide whether you want to maybe purchase an SD to IDE adapter to use some SD card as your hard drive.
I did that for my old Toshiba laptop:
SD Card to 2.5 Inch IDE Adapter, SDHC/SDXC Memory Card Converter to Laptop HDD 44 Pin Male Port
It’s got a Seagate hard drive that looks OK. We’ll see. And a 3.5" floppy that has shown no signs of life. If I can get the power issues sorted I think there’s most of a working PC here.
If I can’t find anyone locally I’ll have to invest in a soldering iron and have a go myself. It’s quite a forest of capacitors on that board though.
Well, your laptop is, as far as I was able to gather, quite rare, so I’d go for it. Try to make an inventory of all caps and if willing, replace them all. No point in waiting for another to pop in a year or so. I’d help, since I do have a bit of stock of capacitors since one of my last projects, but I suspect you’re not in Romania.
You can buy them locally or from China. For such projects I’d say it’s worth the wait.
Seagate is a good brand, you should expect it to work. Just don’t rely any sensitive data on it.
I’d also expect the floppy to work, but the disks… I give you a low chance with the data on those. That’s one of the reasons I recommended an SD to IDE adaptor. You can copy your stuff there directly, make a bootable floppy and install your OS from drive.
Let me know if you get to that stage, I can assist you better there.
Thanks both. I am in the UK, in Yorkshire to be precise. There is a repair cafe once a month around here but I’m new to that scene. I think making an inventory of these caps is a good place to start. The PCBs are immaculate so it would be shame to have more caps leak onto them.
New to the forum but not old kit. Found your thread and this is definitely up my street. I’m a collector of mostly vintage consoles and games but I’m 20yrs in to an IT career sparked by a Laser 286 desktop. Because of that I’ve gone out to collect as much Laser stuff as I can. Shame I only have the workshop manual for the the desktop stuff!
I’ve just got my hands on an L322 with (sadly half dead) PSU but that does have a better pin out picture on the back, does that help? Found your post whilst looking for info and very pleased to learn it’s a 12v battery from here: that’s my next plan.
My PSU did briefly work when it turned up this morning but since doesn’t. Seems I’m also going to need a new screen as mine is very dim despite being backlit but it did seem to POST…
As an aside, if you ever get sick of your Laser stuff, I know of a good home
