Offtopic: Computer would not boot because of dead bios battery

I realize this is not strictly Trisquel related and apologize for that. However in hopes of saving at least one old computer from getting sent to the dump because of such a silly reason I'm posting it.

So I tried powering on my laptop but it wouldn't boot normally. In fact when I took a closer look I noticed it showed very little signs of life, some annoying leds did light up as per usual but not even the screen turned on, much less displayed any of the usual bios stuff. (There was no beeps either. There usually aren't either but in some error cases there might be. [1]) And the hard disk wasn't getting pounded like usually at startup.

I remembered that for the past few months the system clock had been off when I wasn't connected to the internet. I though that would be the only consequence of a dead bios battery. [2] However since replacing it was such an easy and cheap thing to try I did it. I had no idea how to access the battery but I could find a video online where somebody opened the exact laptop model I have and it wasn't too hard to do in the end. Just a little bit scary.

And bam, everything worked again. I was quite relieved. Cost me less than 2 euros. So before you ditch an older computer, this is a trick you might want to try if the symptoms look similar.

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-on_self-test
2 my laptop uses a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CR2032_battery