Would a dead CMOS battery cause a laptop not to boot?

[sWiZzLe]

Hi,

My friends laptop (Acer Aspire 5100) recently stopped working.... well, it powers up but the nothing appears on the monitor. I have tried connecting it to another screen but the same thing happens.

Took it apart today to look for the battery in the hope that i could reset the bios or take the battery out to see if that would help, but the battery is soldered on and i tried touching both connectors to the battery with a screwdriver to reset it but no luck.
Also took most of the components out (memory, hdd, wireless adapter etc), but that didnt help either.

Found the service manual earlier and it says this:

No beep, power-on indicator
turns on and LCD is blank.
Power source (battery pack and power adapter). See
Power System Check.
Reconnect the LCD connector.
Hard disk drive
LCD inverter ID
LCD cable
LCD Inverter
LCD
System board

So im kind of assuming the RTC battery isn't the cause, but just wanted to check.

Cheers

 

[beermonster]

It can on some laptops but not on this acer, sounds like the mainboard is dead, if you have 2 sticks of memory you could try each one individually, other than that mainboards are the most common failure on laptops.

 

[sWiZzLe]

Thanks,

But if the motherboard is dead, how would the fan be running?

Just out of interest, someone asked me earlier today ..... are some of these batteries rechargable?

 

[beermonster]

Ok not dead literally, more like died, most laptop fans just spin up on first power up by default, old toshiba's used to have reachargeable cmos batteries.