n61 battery flat rescue operation

my asus n61jq refused to power up for good yesterday. a symptom prior to this was the laptop was unable to remember the date/time and CMOS settings. based on my experience, i know the cmos battery is getting weak, but it continued to work for a while, and an ntp sync was able to fix the time/date out-of-sync problem. and yesterday, it refused to power up totally. this confirms some notes in the forums that an asus laptop will not power up if the cmos battery is flat.

thanks to youtube, i was able to preview the taking apart of the inner parts, especially locations of the screws and cables. this is the most useful video (though it’s in Russian):

the cmos battery is located next to the touchpad at the lower left corner. so one has to remove almost every screw you can find (counted a total of 4 different types), remove the heat sink, the hard disk, the optical drive, the keyboard, 4 ribbon cables before you can access it.

about 30 mins or so, the dismantling, replacement, and reassembling were completed. the CR2032 cmos battery lithium cell was replaced. and the laptop is now working again! *BIG SMILE*

131012-ASUS N61 rescue