> Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2008 08:22:20 -0800
This is a status update.

> >> From: ... (Robert Maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t)
> >> I opened up every access port I could find on this Dell Latitude
> >> XPi P133ST, even discovered how to pull out the hard disk (an IBM
> >> OEM model), but I don't see anything that looks like a battery.
> >> Where is it located? How can I get to it?

> > From: Daniel Ganek <degs...@comcast.net>
> > It's a laptop. The battery could be under the keyboard.

> From: ... (Robert Maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t)
> Well I took "could" to mean "should" or "probably would", and I
> tried unscrewing the three tiny (but very long) phillips screws on
> the bottom. The result: The faceplate over the keyboard, which
> contains the trackball+buttons and the internal speaker, tilted up,
> which freed the keyboard itself to tilt up. I didn't see anything
> that looked like a battery anywhere in there, but under the
> keyboard I saw a four-wire ribbon cable, orange plastic insulation
> except at the loose end where there was a four-pin metal plug just
> floating free, not plugged in anywhere. I didn't see any obvious
> place it would plug in. Does anybody know where it goes? I don't
> know whether it was hanging loose all the time I had the laptop, or
> whether it came unplugged as I was flipping the keyboard up and
> down after I removed the phillips screws. Even if I do eventually
> find the battery, I don't want to plug in the laptop again until
> that ribbon cable is somewhere other than floating loose making
> random contact with any metal object it finds, such as the metallic
> bottom of the keyboard.

Today I finally found somebody in the local area who would watch as
I opened the case again. He didn't see anything that looked like a
battery either, but he was able to see the socket for plugging in
the 4-wire ribbon-cable, about two inches from where it had been
hanging, which is like a thousand miles on the scale of looking
inside a laptop. So after I got the case closed again I tried
plugging it in and pressing the start button for the first time
since February, and it actually started up (instead of complaining
that configuration was wrong). So I suspect that the ribbon cable
had come loose under normal operation, giving an intermittant or
weak connection, causing the computer to not be able to read the
configuration data. Then when I opened the case a few days later in
February, the motion pulled the cable/plug completely free of where
it had been just touching.

Oh, earlier while the case was open, that other person asked
"what's this" and I saw it had a tab on the very outside that you
slide over to unlock the big thing (as large as the hard disk) to
pull it out, and the moment I had it slid out just an inch I saw it
was a battery. So we thought that was it, until I realized that was
proably the *main* battery for the computer, not the
CPU-configuration battery. So we continued to look for where to
plug in the ribbon cable and where the CPU-configuration might be.

Then after that other person found where the ribbon cable plugged
in, he also noticed a rubber-like funny-looking thingy sitting
between the main battery and the diskette drive. I pried one end of
it up and he saw it said "NiCd" so that was probably the CPU
battery I had been looking for all that time. But I couldn't find
any way to get it sufficiently free to see how to pull it out to
replace it.

> As an alterative to replacing the battery, I'm thinking maybe I
> should just remove the hard disk and stick it into another free
> laptop I can find somewhere. That way I'd be able to keep all my
> files (including Java and J2EE) even if I switch laptops. Does
> anybody know of an organization in the San Jose (California) area
> that matches up throw-away-but-mostly-working laptops with
> low-income people who would like one for free or just a few
> dollars? Do most laptops have the same size slot and connector
> design, so that a hard drive from one kind of laptop would just
> plug into another kind of laptop? Or do I need to specify some
> particular connector type and slot shape when I ask for a
> free/lowcost laptop? Does RedHat Linux automatically configure
> itself to a different machine if the hard disk is put into some
> completely different laptop with power down then power is turned
> on? ...

Now that the computer per se is working again, I tried the modem
again, thinking maybe the loose ribbon cable that messed up
configuration at boot had also (earlier) affected the modem. But
the communication program still claims it's already online whenever
I try to dial a phone number, so it's still wedged, and I still
need somebody who can tell me how to diagnose whether the modem
itself needs replacing or there's something wedged in lock files or
somesuch within Linux. But at least I can see my files again on the
laptop, and if I ever get the modem problem resolved I'll be able
to up/down-load files again. So the idea of simply getting a newer
free/lowcost laptop and moving the hard disk to it isn't as urgent
as it was when this laptop didn't boot up at all. But still, if I
can find somebody in the local area (Sunnyvale, Mountain View,
Santa Clara, San Jose, Palo Alto, Cupertino, etc.) who will give me
a free old laptop or sell me one for $5 or so, that would be
cheaper than buying a new modem for the current one, especially if
it turns out there's nothing wrong with the modem and it's just a
bug in Linux causing the simulated wedged-online state so that even
with a brand-new modem it still refuses to dial phone numbers.

After composing all the above, before sending, I thought of a new
idea: I completely removed the modem while the power was off,
then booted the system, then started minicom and asked it to try to
dial a number. Result: minicom says I'm still online. So it can't
be a problem with the modem itself, it's gotta be a bug in Linux,
right?

Now that it boots up, I'm moving this thread over to the networking
newsgroup, to get specific help about the bug when there isn't even
a modem plugged in, but keeping this one last message in the setup
group so that you-all will hear the final news about *that* problem
I had.