For the past few months the lithium ion battery on my wife's computer
has been losing it's capacity. Now it's gotten to the point where it
won't keep the computer running more than a few minutes in the event
of a loss of AC power. Up to this point this hasn't been a problem
because my wife never really takes the computer out of the house. A
few weeks ago she started asking about getting a new battery. (You
never can predict these things), and so I investigated this. I knew
I'd have to make some kind of arrangements eventually, but truthfully
with Batteries Plus asking 79.00 and the cheaper online offers
questionable at best, I haven't been eager to jump into this, so thus
far we haven't done anything.

The other day she told me about a new problem that she'd been having
with the computer over the previous two weeks or so. It seems that
every so often instead of the computer going through post and then
booting up, a few seconds after you attempt powering it up a blue
rectangular box pops up with a black screen behind it. Inside the box
is an "enter password" message. Neither of us have ever seen this box
before, nor do we have any idea what "password" it's looking for. (Our
usual ones don't work). I tried removing AC power as well as the LI
battery for a few days but this had no effect.

Toshiba has a 24 hour tech line that if you're lucky enough to connect
to a intelligible person might be of some help. So I called them. The
Indian girl seemed knowledgeable, I could understand her, and she
suggested that the message was asking for a "CMOS" password, which she
said someone must have put it into the boot sequence. I've never heard
of anything like this and I told her that it was not possible that
anyone in this house could have installed this into the computer. I
know that I didn't, and I'm only slightly more computer literate than
my wife, which is not saying much.

The tech suggested that we will need to reset the CMOS by pulling the
internal battery. According to her, the battery could be defective as
well. Now I can certainly pull the battery and replace it as well if
need be, however I have my doubts about that being the cause of this.
This laptop is not that old and I have to question if this is what the
problem actually is. If it is in fact a dead CMOS battery, why would
it lock me out of BIOS? And if it isn't, why did it happen in the
first place?

Unbeknownst to me my wife has stored all the Grand Children's pictures
on this computer with no backup anywhere else. So if anyone has any
rabbits they might be able to pull from their hat, I'd really
sincerely appreciate any advice. Thanks, Lenny