Why your 505 may have suddenly died

    After after almost three years of faithful operation, my 505FX suddenly died. The symptoms were not promising:

    • Dead as a brick with both fully charged batteries (with external charger) or with AC
    • Wouldn't charge any battery (no flashing light)

    Fortunately I had registered my VAIO right after I bought it and thus extended the warranty to three years. Now this happened one week before I would have been completely out of luck. So, after some struggling with Sony customer service (which didn't want to acknowledge my unit was still under warranty until I faxed them the documents they sent me almost three years ago), my unit was picked up by UPS and was back about a week later.

    I checked what had been replaced, and it was the BIOS battery! (see image). Now I remembered that the unit was equally dead when I received it from the dealer, and the dealer told me to leave the unit connected to AC for a few hours to give the BIOS battery a chance to charge. So a dead BIOS battery causes the entire notebook to play dead!.

    I wouldn't be surprised if that was the reason for many of those "suddenly dead" notebooks on eBay. The cure could be so simple: just replace the BIOS battery, or at least leave the notebook connected to mains power for a few hours to recharge those batteries a bit. This may work if you haven't used it in months, but if the battery is worn, you need to replace it. Unfortunately the replacement from Sony is quite expensive though (around $50, if memory serves), and I couldn't find the original Varta part number anywhere. It's a 7.2V 15mAh NiMH battery made by Varta. What you can find though are separate 1.2V 15mAh NiMH cells. Buy 6 of them, solder them together in an arrangement like the original part, and recycle the connector and wires. Finally shrink-wrap the whole unit with shrink tubing available at good electronics parts suppliers.

    Don't be alarmed if your VAIO doesn't start right up, the battery may be empty as well, but at least these new ones will charge, in contrast with your old ones. Your VAIO should give you no more problems at least with the BIOS battery for another few years...

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