have a dell inspiron 600m laptop. I heard about bios/cmos and I think I am looking for a cmos battery. I found what looks like a watch battery with a purple plastic casing on the top of it. It just covers the top not the bottom. The battery is connected to the board. I can lift it and it will go up and down like a lever. I heard that you have to remove it, but my concern is that how am I supposed to put it back? Will the setup defaults stay on forever if the battery is not there even if me or someone locks up the setup config to just the hd or is it still possible to save setup config when the battery that holds the custom info is not there?
are you trying to reset the cmos? removing the battery for s few seconds will reset it. all of you settings are stored on a chip on the motherboard not in the battery. without power the chip cant remember the settings. why do you want to reset it?
i don't know the pw. dont have all the info when i got the laptop. I just need a way to get setup defaults. The cmos chip is soldered to the motherboard though. Where is this chip that stores all my settings that you referred to?
is there a password for the bios? or is the password in windows? if its in the bios you will need to reset the cmos. if its in windows you will need to format the hard drive and reinstall windows. the cmos and bios are some where on the motherboard but you dont need to know where you are. if you know the model number of the laptop try a google search and how to reset it.
It's for the bios. I can still boot into Windows. So I'm guessing the password I need is the bios admin password.
i found a thread that might help. it is about how to remove a lost password for a dell. http://www.techspot.com/vb/all/windows/t-18780.html
that thread seems to only be for dell laptops besides the inspiron 600m. I can enter the bios and see the settings but I can not make changes so i have to enter the admin password in the configure setup field before any changes are made. Anything you guys know that can do this or anything I can do?
every time i do that. they say that i need to provide ownership of the previous owner. well i dont know that. then i hear about transfer of ownership and since im in america it would be quick. but everytime i hit submit it asks for the name fields to be filled in the previous owner section which i dont't know. if anyone wants to help me generate a password (if that's even possible) or something then please assist.
i found this but i dont know how reliable it is. but it only costs $8. http://www.classidol.com/content/view/6/9/
You mean $89.99? Too expensive. If I gave you the service tag #, do you think you could help me further?
it says its only 7.99 on this page http://www.classidol.com/#order if you gave me the service tag i might be able to generate a code but im not sure.
