Originally Posted by
flyinphill
It is not that difficult to do. We first took photographs of all the BIOS settings before removing anything just in case. We then removed the WS and RT boards. The battery on the WS board is very easy to get to. Once the board is out, it is right on top, easily accessible. What makes it tough is trying to connect a jumper battery to it. You can clip right onto the positive contact, but there is no way to get to the negative side of the battery holder from the top of the board. We ended up taking out the 4 screws bolting it to the aluminum tray, plus took all of the nuts for the DB9 and other connectors to free the motherboard from the aluminum rack. This gave us access to the soldering lug for the negative side of the battery holder, located on the back side of the board.
Once the board was totally free from the rack, we stood the board on edge on a static pad. With a helper providing a second set of hands, I clipped the positive of my jumper battery to the top clip, and had the helper hold the negative to the negative solder lug while I changed out the batteries. The actual battery swap took about 10 seconds, and we didn't lose any BIOS information in the process.
As for the RT, I have no help for you, read my above post. My machine has no conventional battery to replace.