So my wife's new laptop stops working tonight, when my 11-year-old daughter accidentally pops out the battery while the thing is not plugged in, and is under a heavy load.
The only thing it would do is give the Dell splash screen then say F2 for setup F12 for Boot Menu and then no matter what option you chose (or if you chose no option), it would go to a black screen and the following words would display in white:
time-of-day clock stopped .

I googled this message, and it appeared that either the motherboard battery was dead, or some data got scrambled (or maybe both). Others said that replacing the CMOS battery did the trick. Since I had some CR2032 batteries in the house, I downloaded the maintenance manual and got to work. I only had to remove the hard drive, the DVD drive, the heat sink assembly, the display, the palm rest, a daughterboard, the motherboard, and flip the motherboard over to get to the CMOS battery. It only took about 2.5 hours to disassemble, replace the battery, and reassemble the laptop. It worked, by the way. Simply removing the battery and putting it back in may have also fixed the problem, but unlike a desktop computer, where you can test it while the case is still open, I pretty much had to reassemble the whole thing before testing the fix. I can, however, test the battery I took out with a meter, and if it reads normal, I can use that less-than-six-months-old battery in something else.