Software

This will have the same effect though as this is a NB you'll need to first disconnect he Mains Adaptor than the NB Battery and then the BIOS Battery.

Depending on the make of the NB this may not even clear the BIOS as some NB's have a Smart Socket for the BIOS Chip which has it's own Power Supply. If you have one of these it needs to be returned to the Service Agent to have this fixed.

Col

Remember that a labtop is not a desktop computer and has a higher level of security.

There is a eeprom chip that controls the stored passwords on this labtop... it required disassembly of the labtop... when I did this i entirely removed the motherboard from the labtop and placed only the esential components on a table. The chip is located under the pcmcia port... there is a black plastic sticker of sorts that you must remove and the chip is a small 8 legged chip labeled ump1.... you will see it next to a larger chip with many legs. Looking at this chip where the dot is is pin 1. You must partially reassemble the labtop with the keyboard, screen, ac power, and both processor and video heatsinks with cooling fan ( you can just temporarly sit these components ontop of the motheroard to prevent the board from shutting down from heat) . Then get a small piece of insulated wire, paperclip, tweesers, etc. Orient the labtop so that the bios chip is in front of you and the small dot is to your lower left. In this position the correct pins are the third from the left on the bottom and top. What you need to do is turn on the labtop, short these pins. Do not worry the labtop will seem to shut off.... wait 2 seconds and release the pins, and then reshort them. A screen will then appear that says manufacturing mode level 1 etc etc... you have now cleared your bios passwords... you will not be able to reset the bios passwords, however it is possible to set the hard drive password through the bios so I dont think that it is a issue. The manufacturing mode does not interfere with any working of the labtop . Congrats you have now hacked your labtop.

Some notes about disassembly and reassembly:

make sure to remove the monitor screen first... prying up on the latitude bar right above the keyboard , there is a prypoint to the far right.

Make sure to keep the location of the bios battery hoopup it is a pain in the butt to forget that because then your settings you set in the bios will not be saved.

make sure that when you disassemble the screen that the screws are under the little rubber feet with the exception of the long ones at the center of the screen.

if you do this hack and someone has enabled the hard drive password you will have to search and download the hack for it. When I did it I used another hard drive in the labtop that had xp installed in it. I then used a windows 98 install disk and a 5 gig usb memory stick and installed windows 98 on it... then I put the original hard drive in the labtop and changed the boot sequence to the usb drive and booted windows 98.... there will be many devices that will not be available, do not try to install any drivers , you are only interested in cracking the hd.... once up and running on generic drivers run the crack program. Remember to change the boot order back to whatever you like after cracking the HD.

the black plastic sticky tape that covers the bios eeprom chip must be replaced to eliminate the possibility of short or damage due to hard drive heat.

The hard drive on this labtop will get exceptionally warm... about 40 d celcius... dont worry.... here is how you fix it... during the reassembly of the labtop, if you are not going to use the pcmcia slot leave the motherboard pcmcia connector off as well as the steel support cage that goes there... this will give the labtop added cooling using the processor cooler to circulate more air through the case, the hd will not heat up at all(barely warm).

there are many hidden screws that attach the motherboard to the steel underlying chasis, removal of these is not necessary, the only ones that are necessary are the ones around the dock port on the back of the labtop and in all 4 corners and the ones in the middle of the labtop ( on the back of the labtop).

That is all I can think of right now if you have any questions let me know wmtdanimal@yahoo.com