Chosen Solution
I recently bought a Sony Clie PEG-SL10, primarily for the fact that it takes 2 AAA batteries (easy to replace). However when I do replace the batteries the whole unit hard resets. I can’t find a lot of information on the motherboard but there appears to be 4 cells that might be small batteries (or maybe capacitors?) that would keep the memory long enough to swap batteries over. They appear to be soldered in. Edit: added annotated cells on an image of motherboard.
Anyone know how I can fix the unit? I’d love to contribute a guide for it, and maintain a great piece of old kit.
@bensleveritt if you are looking at what I think you are, then yes, those are batteries. But just to make sure, circle the components you are looking at and post that images with your question. If those batteries are depleted, you will always end up with a hard reset. You may just have to replace them as well.
@bensleveritt To me it looks like they’re soldered onto the board and their solder tags are spot welded onto the battery case. This is usual for batteries with solder tags because soldering leads directly onto batteries using a soldering iron requires too much heat and can cause problems in the battery so the tags are spot welded on in the factory under controlled conditions. Unsolder the battery tag connections on the board to remove the complete battery unit i.e. battery with attached tags. Hopefully the battery model number will be stamped on the other side of the battery. If so search online for the battery model number to hopefully find suppliers. Also take note if there is a polarity marking on the other side as well i.e. + symbol. If so make sure that you connect the replacement batteries the same way. You can damage rechargeable batteries if they’re installed incorrectly i.e. reverse polarity
